


Kids Who Don’t Play With Trains When They’re Young Will Never Grow Up to Become Skilled City Planners

by Game_Changer



Category: Gintama
Genre: Ensemble Cast, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Genre Whiplash, Humor, M/M, Metaphorical Trains, Misunderstandings, Occasional angst, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-29
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-02-23 13:12:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 57,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13190820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Game_Changer/pseuds/Game_Changer
Summary: Two idiots engage in the longest, most utterly pointless con of the century for no particularly good reason.





	1. Chapter 1

If someone put a sword to his neck and told him to tell them the root cause of all of this, Toshirou would probably tell them to fuck off and get back to work, Sougo, but in his own head he might admit to himself that it was all sleep deprivation. Taking an extended leave from your futon got to you after a while. As you gradually lost control of your motor functions, your mental functions slipped off the rails too. Your trains of thought started careening toward stations they weren’t supposed to be going to, and those stations were closed off for good reasons. Some of them were so well sealed shut that even Toshirou had no idea what existed in there and that was fine.

He was pretty sure everything would have stayed fine if he hadn’t been running on three hours of sleep in as many days when he stumbled past a loud, heated argument between squad captains Matsubara, Inoue, and Sougo in the middle of the Shinsengumi mess hall. After failing miserably to catch the bastards making that graffiti of the Shogun and numerous Amanto in compromising positions on the walls lining the most crowded thoroughfares in the city, all Toshirou had wanted to do was inhale some food and pass out for a week, but he just so happened to be in the wrong fucking place at the wrong fucking time.

“That was just a fluke!” Inoue was saying. “No way our guys are covering your team’s bathroom duty for a fluke.”

“What do people call it when the fluke happens every time?” Sougo asked with a lazily feigned air of innocence. “Isn’t that the opposite of a fluke?”

“Well, we’ve only seen him do it that once with the commander, and she’s Kondo’s answer to everything, so it’s hardly proof! No deal,” Matsubara harrumphed.

Toshirou was barely giving the conversation an ear when Sougo caught his shoulder.

“What?” he growled.

“If it works on this guy too, that’d be proof enough right?” Sougo said, ignoring Toshirou’s glare to instead pat his bicep dismissively. “Everyone here knows what Hijikata-san’s answer would be, and how he’d never actually say it if he knew the question.”

Matsubara and Inoue looked at each other for a moment before nodding.

“Fine,” Matsubara said. “If he can get the Vice-Commander to say that name.”

“What name? Actually, I don’t care. Get back to work,” Toshirou snapped and shrugged off Sougo’s grip.

“Don’t be that way. It’ll only take a minute,” Sougo wheedled.

Intent on ignoring him, Toshirou made it a few steps away until Sougo added, “I’ll do all my paperwork correctly and on time for a month.”

“You’re supposed to be doing that already,” Toshirou replied, his words in direct contrast with the back peddling of his feet as he did an about-face and sat down at their table. “So what do I have to do?”

“Nothing,” Sougo replied easily. “Just let Kumanaku-san do his thing.”

Kumanaku. That overly fastidious member of Sougo’s team who was obsessed with toilet hygiene. Based on his admittedly scant interaction with the guy over the past few years, Toshirou wasn’t sure he wanted to just let Kumanaku do his thing, but before he could ask what exactly Kumanaku’s thing was, Kumanaku’s hands were firmly massaging Toshirou’s temples and Kumanaku’s voice was saying, “Vice-Commander, I would ask that you close your eyes and listen to my story.”

If Toshirou had been even a fraction more awake, he really would have given Kumanaku a friendly uppercut by now, but the head massage was doing wonders for the stress migraine he had been fending off for the last ten hours. Plus, Sougo was offering paperwork here. What choice did he have? Toshirou closed his eyes and let himself relax.

After a moment, Kumanaku began:

“You have been chopping wood in the forest using your trusty ax. This ax has been trusted not only by you, but also by your father, and his father before, as this is no ordinary ax. It is not made of iron or steel or gold or silver, but of a material unknown. Unknown and unbeatable. Through generations of your family the ax never fell against an object it could not cleave, or encountered a tree it could not conquer, or witnessed a marriage it could not split up.”

“That last one doesn’t really make sense,” Toshirou said.

“The ax is unrivaled in its power of splitting,” Kumanaku continued. “It splits apart intangible relationships as easily as it does physical objects. The invisible threads that bind one human to another are severed by this merciless ax as swiftly and as cleanly as if they had never been there at all.”

“That’s because they weren’t,” Toshirou said.

“This is why happily-ever-afters do not last long in your family. Months after they had their first son, your grandfather and grandmother split apart, just like your mother and father split apart mere weeks after they had you. The ax is a blessing and a curse, splitting whatever it encounters. It has no conscience, it knows no distinction between what should be split and what shouldn’t, it only does what it is made to do, and it does so perfectly.”

“It just sounds like my family was really dysfunctional and blaming their marital problems on an ax. Tell a better story.”

“Right you are, Vice-Commander,” Kumanaku agreed. “That is what you want: a better story. You want more than tragedy from this ax now that it has fallen to you since Carmentia finally felled your father.”

“Who is Carmentia? Wasn’t my family just a group of lumberjacks? Why does it seem like you’re implying that my father was just murdered by his sworn rival?”

“Shut up and listen to the story, Hijikata-san,” Sougo drawled.

“You want to stop this endless cycle of splitting up and falling down,” Kumanaku proclaimed. “You know there must be a way to stop that indiscriminate pain brought to those that hold this mystical tool in their hands.”

“Holding it does seem to be the problem. I put down the ax and leave,” Toshirou said and moved to get up and away from this ridiculous waste of time, but Kumanaku’s hands kept his head in place.

“You refuse to leave this ax for anyone else to discover. This is a burden that has been passed down through your family, and it is a demon your family’s own flesh and blood must conquer. You embark on a quest to figure out how to change this ax that is so determined to split objects apart into an ax that puts things back together.”

“Determination has nothing to do with it. It’s an ax.”

“You exit the forest you’ve lived your whole life, crossing mountains and deserts and oceans. You wander through town after town, meeting thousands of faces speaking in dialects and languages you’ve never imagined existed. You step along the outskirts of battlefields, utopias, parades, and executions. You see the sun rise along horizons that change its personality and color enough to make it different each and every time. You see the world from edge to edge, nook to cranny, sea to sky. You travel for years upon years upon years with the axe at your side, searching but never finding yourself any closer to the answer to the impossible question: how do you change nature? How do you change the very laws of existence?”

Kumanaku paused and lifted a hand off of Toshirou’s head to take a quick sip of water. The group was silent as he drank. He cleared his throat once, twice, and resumed:

“You spend your life on this quest with nothing to show for it. You sacrificed your soul for this mission, but the ax is still as sharp as it ever was. As a defeated old man, your beard long and gray, you make your return home. Eventually you reach the familiar forest of your youth and approach the cabin you were born in, as your father and grandfather were before you. At the threshold of your childhood home, you cannot help but wonder what will happen to this ax at your death. You never had any children of your own, so there is no one to succeed you in carrying this burden. The ax will remain, but you, inevitably, will not. In one last act of desperation, you leave the cabin and travel a few hundred yards over to the lake where your grandfather told you as a child about a fairy with great magical powers that had made its home there.”

“Why didn’t I start my quest at this lake?! That kind of seems important!”

“When you reach the lake you try your best to summon the being your grandfather told you about. He said it was a creature that gives you a glance and you at once feel Understood. It has a face that reminds you in no uncertain terms that from the fires of chaos and blood, goodness will not only rise, it will soar. It will conquer. It is a being you trust wholeheartedly, and who you would give everything in service to if only you had the chance, because you know their strength and vision will lead us out of the shadows and into a brighter world. You believe in this being’s heart. You believe in this being’s soul. Do you understand, Vice-Commander?”

Somewhat thrown to find himself suddenly addressed, Toshirou took a few seconds to muster up a subdued, “Yeah.”

“Immerse yourself in the emotion of what is before you. Don’t think, feel. Consider how your heart beats when faced with this creature, and watch as that very being rises from that lake. It rises to meet you and together you will finish this quest. Together, you will reach the end. There is no doubt in your mind that together you can dull the edges of this ax.”

Toshirou nodded slowly, but he wasn’t entirely sure if he initiated the movement or if Kumanaku’s hands made it happen. 

“You want to be surprised when you see that this creature looks like someone you know, but you can’t be surprised. Deep inside, you already knew. You already knew who it would be. Tell me their name, Vice-Commander.”

“Huh?” Toshirou said. His tongue felt strangely heavy.

“Don’t think, feel. Who is it? Who is in front of you?”

Out of the darkness of his mind’s eye, he saw a head of hair emerge from the lake. Rivulets of water ran down a forehead, a nose, a chin, and shoulders – shoulders covered by a bright yukata that flowed around them with an ethereal lightness despite the wet. They rose taller and taller in the lake as they walked to its very edge and stood directly before Toshirou staring right into the very center of him.

Finally, the being opened its mouth and said, “If you want my help with this, you’d better be prepared to pay up a pretty penny, mayo bastard.”

Toshirou opened his eyes to see four sets of them trained intently on his face.

“Who was it, Vice-Commander?” Kumanaku asked.

“It was the fucking Yorozuya,” Toshirou said. “Are we done now?”

Matsubara and Inoue jumped up immediately, clapping each other on the back and grinning victoriously at Sougo.

“Hah! He didn’t say Mitsuba-dono, so that’s our win, Okita-san,” Matsubara jeered. “It looks like it’s double bathroom duty for your team.”

Noticing Toshirou’s look of confusion, Inoue jumped in to explain: “Kumanaku-san was claiming he could get anyone to say who they were in love with by doing his weird hand thing and telling that story. He got the commander to say Shimura Tae, but it didn’t work on you! Thanks for proving us right, Vice-Commander!”

Time froze.

Suddenly wide awake and thrumming with adrenaline, Toshirou quickly attempted to track down the conductor of his last train of thought where he’d had that strange vision of the permy idiot rising up from the lake. It had to be some sort of mistake – some lazy misfiring of neurons. It didn’t have to mean anything significant. The Yorozuya wasn’t anything to him. Matsubara and Inoue knew it. Everyone knew it. Everyone knew this wasn’t –

Toshirou felt a strange presence to his right, and looked up to see Sougo staring at him with the widest, most monstrous sneer he’d ever witnessed.

“Shut the hell up!” he hissed.

“How rude. I didn’t say a word, Hijikata-san,” Sougo replied, demonic expression unchanging. “I should be the one angry at you for making me lose a bet, but somehow, for some strange reason, I just can’t seem to manage it.”

Injuring your subordinates in the middle of their meals tended to be frowned upon here, Toshirou reminded himself. Although, Sougo was more than capable of defending himself, and Toshirou would be more likely to exit the skirmish as the injured party than vice versa, but he preferred to use the first excuse when talking himself down.

Deciding to firmly ignore the little shit for the time being, Toshirou finally got the conductor of that train of thought on the line. When frantically questioned, the conductor calmly informed him that the train in question had been rolling in to Feelings for Yorozuya Station at the time of the incident; apparently a lot of passengers had bought tickets there so the conductor had made an executive decision to switch up his route to get them all where they wanted to go. When the conductor refused to be convinced that no such station could possibly exist, Toshirou then asked him if there were any terrorists on that train who might be willing to blow up that station at which point the conductor hung up the phone because he was on a schedule, and also entirely imaginary.

Back in the real world, Toshirou lit a cigarette in a desperate attempt to clear his thoughts.

Kumanaku cautiously mentioned to him that he was trying to light the tip of his sword on fire, which he found to be strange slang for cigarette, but he wasn’t hip with the kids anymore, so what did he know. He put the cigarette in his mouth, which tasted strangely metallic and bloody, but he really didn’t have time to waste on small details right now. He just needed to calmly reconsider all of his life choices, find the one of them that brought him to this point, and go back in time to kill the him that made it. This would be simple. This would all be fine.

“Toshi, what are doing?!” Kondo was screaming and running across the room toward him like there was something to be concerned about, but there wasn’t. Toshirou would solve this. It would be fine. It would be just fine. But why was this cigarette so damn heavy?

 

* * *

 

When he woke up 12 hours later, Toshirou greeted the world with the firm hope that yesterday had been a simple fever dream. Or maybe he’d been high on paint fumes from when that graffiti terrorist had sprayed him in the face in order to make a getaway. Or maybe he had temporarily stepped into an alternate dimension and now he was back. Anything, really. He was rooting for any possible alternative.

He cautiously contacted the senior conductor in charge of all his train (of thought) stations, and the guy reported that Feelings for Yorozuya Station had officially become part of the main line. Since that first train had arrived there, the station had become so popular that it just wouldn’t be economically feasible to close it off again right now.

“Am I in hell?” he asked his ceiling.

 

* * *

 

Toshirou felt the sword tip digging into the back of his neck and decided that this was the last fucking straw.

“To think I would catch the Demon Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi off guard, staring into the window of a sweets shop, no less!” the rebel fighter crowed and laughed uproariously. “Were you trying to figure out which cupcake to buy?”

He had actually been looking at the selection and idly wondering which treats the Yorozuya might be interested in, but that was even worse.

The only saving grace about this situation was that the guy was laughing so hard he didn’t even notice that Toshirou had grabbed the blade of his sword until the hilt was slammed into his face. Toshirou repeated the movement a couple more times for good measure.

As he began dragging the bleeding, moaning man through the snow and to the station, Toshirou considered his options. Something had to be done. If he didn’t regain his focus soon, the end of his life would come sooner.

It had been the same sort of mess when Feelings for Mitsuba Station opened up back in Bushu. The smallest, most inconsequential shit would bring her to mind. A deer with a high-pitched sneeze, peppers, warm colors… He got his ass beat in practice more times in that one month than he did during the whole rest of the year.

Toshirou had regained his footing once he realized that he was no good for her. She could never live well with him and the life he chose to live, so what was the point of thinking about any of that? From then on, despite his feelings, he was no longer distracted. Her station remained and still does to this day, but the trains of thought only occasionally passed through.

Unfortunately, the same tactic was not going to work here. The Yorozuya was rotten to the core and the opposite of delicate, so Toshirou wouldn’t be protecting anyone but himself by staying away. The possibility remained open in his mind, which left him here. Distracted.

So that was it. He had to find some way to annihilate any shitty hopes he was subconsciously harboring

Goddammit.

 

* * *

 

Finally the solution came to him a week later as he was unwinding with a drink after the end of his shift. It sat down on the stool next to him, waved to the bartender, and said he would be ordering drinks on Mr. Vice-Commander’s tab.

Toshirou let him because seeing the bastard in the flesh for the first time since this all started caused a train pileup at Feelings for Yorozuya Station and he forgot how to use his mouth to form words until Gintoki was halfway through his second glass. However, when they were both on their fourth glass Toshirou found his plan. He knew how to take care of this one-sided infatuation once and for all. It was almost too easy.

Obviously the Yorozuya didn’t feel the same way, so Toshirou just needed to get him to say it, because his train conductor needed to hear it, and there was one surefire way to get that done. The Yorozuya had no problems turning people down. That’s all he ever seemed to do when girls approached him with interest. If Toshirou just asked him out, the idiot would stomp on his feelings, spit on the remains, and be on his way.

No more uncertainties, no more maybes, he could fix his problem through one short moment of humiliation. He could do this. He would do this. Now.

“Yorozuya,” he said.

“Hmm,” the Yorozuya replied mid-sip.

“Go out with me.”

“Where?” the Yorozuya asked.

“No,” Toshirou said, insistently, “go _out_ with me.”

“And I said _where_?” the Yorozuya snapped. “I’m not going anyplace too far. It’s cold as balls tonight.”

“NO!” Toshirou stood, slammed both hands on the counter in frustration, and yelled, “I’m not asking you to go out with me to a place; I am asking in the gay way! I’m asking because I’m in love with you, dumbass!”

There. Now all the cards were on the table.

The bar went silent.

The Yorozuya’s face seemed to malfunction. His mouth was still scrunched in the mild irritation it had started to carry when he had thought Toshirou had wanted him to go outside in this weather, while his eyebrows were raised high enough that they seemed only one twitch away from flying toward the ceiling, physics and biology be damned, and the tips of his ears were flushed a bright, unsubtle pink. There was a disjointed Picasso of emotion going on there, and Toshirou wondered for a moment if he’d gone a bit too far.

Maybe he should have just asked the guy for a quick fuck. The ‘L’ word was probably easier for someone like the Yorozuya to brush off and turn down when there was a hotel attached to the end of it. A casual proposition would have been easier on everyone, even if it wasn’t exactly true to his own feelings. Toshirou had always been an all or nothing kind of guy, but there was a time and a place to broadcast that shit, and the here and now was looking more and more likely to be neither of those. Toshirou maybe should have given himself some time to think this plan through when he had been a little more sober.

Oh, well. Too late now.

He leaned forward toward the Yorozuya, eyes narrowing and mind focusing with the level of intensity he only spared for the most difficult of Shinsengumi missions, life-or-death battles, and midnight mayonnaise runs. Toshirou faced him with all that he was. _Now come, Gintoki! Shoot me down! Let me feel for you without consequence or obligation!_

“So,” Toshirou pursued, “what’s it going to be?”

The Yorozuya opened his mouth once, but no sound came out. Silence reigned for what felt like half a day, but was probably a little less than that.

He opened his mouth again and… put some beer in there.

It was hard for Toshirou to ignore how awkward this was getting, but his boss was Kondo after all, so he did have some experience standing in rooms of people where some terrible social faux pas had just been committed, and the atmosphere weighed on you like a couple of full-sized 18 wheelers. Someone patted him on the back, and he looked over his shoulder to see an old man giving him a trembling thumbs up. An old woman who must have been his wife or mistress or something was nestled in the crook of his non-thumbs upping arm, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief and smiling mistily in Toshirou’s direction.

 _Oiiii! Yorozuya!_ Toshirou beamed his thoughts in the idiot’s direction. _The bar is getting emotionally invested in this! Cut it off at the pass, you dumb shit! Just say no! You’ve never had problems with the word before!_

His right leg jackhammering like a woodpecker with a deadline, the Yorozuya set his beer down, took a breath, cleared his throat, and… started coughing.

Coughing on what? Air? The terribleness of this situation manifested in physical form? Toshirou heard a rough snap and that’s when he noticed he was gripping the counter hard enough that cracks were starting to appear. He should probably stop doing that.

Someone slid a glass of water in the Yorozuya’s direction, and he nodded his thanks before gulping it up. He put the glass down and… started coughing again.

Enough was enough. Toshirou had thought the Yorozuya would have had the balls to be a bit more direct than that, but avoidance of the question was an answer in itself.

So that was it then. He felt lighter already.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Toshirou said. “You don’t have to worry. Unlike some of the stalkers out there, I only ask once.”

Leaning back with a smile, he put on his overcoat, told the bartender to close his tab, and started to walk past the Yorozuya, who, in between hacking up his lungs, choked out a “Wait one… goddamn second!”

Toshirou stopped in his tracks, and locked eyes with a still-convulsing Gintoki, whose whole face was now redder than the cherries on the top of the parfaits he loved so much. Globs of spit and snot decorated his chin and cheeks. He looked just as earnest as he did disgusting, and Toshirou found himself suddenly reminded of that strange, stupid vision he’d had of the Yorozuya rising from the lake before quickly banning the association from his thoughts.

What could possibly be so damn important to the Yorozuya that he was willing to keep this train wreck of an encounter going in order to spit it out?

Oh. Of course.

“I’m not opening up my tab again tonight no matter what you do, so don’t even try.”

This mooching train was leaving the station. Toshirou’s smile grew as he stepped out into the snow. Everything was finally getting back on track.

 

* * *

 

“That really was some excellent work, Toshi,” Kondo said, grinning warm and wide. “You’ve been unstoppable this week.”

In an effort not to appear too obviously pleased, Toshirou looked out the window at the passing scenery just as the train hit a curve and threw the sun right into his eyes. He casually returned his gaze to the two men seated in front of him, trying not to blink too much.

“Don’t worry. I’ll stop you one day, Hijikata-san,” Sougo assured him with a blank stare that was somehow hard enough to combat Kondo’s cheer. The kid never took it too well when Toshirou fell too deep into Kondo's favor.

Too bad for him. Toshirou was planning to keep on bowling strikes.

“The spirit you’ve shown of late almost reminds me of when you started getting along well with Mitsuba-dono,” Kondo recalled, and that wasn’t too far off point.

When Toshirou reconciled himself to the reality that there would be no opportunity for him to hold Mitsuba, he started landing more hits during practice again. Her train station became inspiration for him to do better, to fight for a world where she could be happy. He wasn’t thinking of being with her anymore; he was just thinking of her. The reach of his sword grew in order to enact her will.

He was fighting for Gintoki now too. That idiot believed in a world that included spaces of goodness for good people, and Toshirou wanted to protect that.

Shifting through intel documents over the past few days, he found it easier to differentiate signal from noise, predict enemy movements, and focus on getting those hostages out of that hole-in-a-wall on the outskirts of Kanazawa before the terrorists could extort any more money out of the government. Now as they all rode the train home to Edo, the Shinsengumi members present were in a rather celebratory mood.

Toshirou hummed vaguely in response to Kondo’s comment, which his commander eagerly jumped on as a sign of admission.

“Does that mean I’m right?” Kondo crowed. “Have you met someone? Toshi, you dog!”

Kondo laughed and ruffled Toshirou’s hair, while Sougo took the opportunity to stealthily spit on Toshirou’s shoe.

“It’s nothing like that,” he demurred as he tried to rub his wet shoe against Sougo’s pant leg, but instead met the empty space where the little shit’s leg had been milliseconds before. “They’re not interested.”

“Maybe not yet,” Kondo harrumphed, “but I can’t see a woman resisting your charms for long! You had better introduce me soon, so I can put in a good word for you.”

Toshirou chuckled wryly, “That Shimura girl will agree to go out with you before mine even gives me a second look.”

And that was how he liked it. He felt strengthened without being weighed down. He could fight for him without fighting with him. Unreciprocated feelings were power!

“You say that like Otae-san will never accept my love. You say that like pigs flying is more likely!” Kondo cried, surprising Toshirou out of his self-indulgent reverie.

Snapping to attention, he realized just what he’d said and how he’d said it. Shit.

Kondo had both his hands tightly clasped on his knees, his head hanging down to leave his face in shadow, but Toshirou could still make out a wetness in his eyes. Shit shit shit.

“Kondo-san, I didn’t mean it like that. I just–”

“Just what, Toshi? You just don’t believe in me?”

“Yeah, Toshi? Why do you have to be such an ass?” Sougo asked gleefully.

“Stop it, Sougo,” Kondo said. “I am in the wrong here.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong!” Toshirou immediately leapt to his defense.

Well, technically he should have been arrested a hundred times over for continuously stalking an unwilling party, but that wasn’t what they were talking about, were they?

“I did,” Kondo insisted. “I led poorly by example. I am the reason you don’t have the confidence to chase your own happiness.”

Say what now?

“You and the rest of the Shinsengumi have watched me pursue a woman day after day who has yet to accept my feelings. After seeing your commander fail so many times, you must have absorbed the lesson that failure in love is normal,” Kondo continued, nodding sadly to himself.

“No, I don’t think any of us thought that was normal,” Toshirou said.

“You must not be led astray by my mistakes! A strong heart and a romantic head can overcome any obstacle, so don’t you dare give up!” Kondo cried clasping both of Toshirou’s hands strongly in his own. “I have knocked you off course with my failings, but we will get back on track together!”

“I’m really okay though,” Toshirou attempted.

“Promise me this, Toshi,” Kondo said intently. “If I succeed in my love, you will stop at nothing to succeed in yours.”

Well, pigs really would fly before Kondo landed that woman, so Toshirou didn’t see the harm in appeasing his commander.

“Sure. Okay.”

 

* * *

 

It was only 48 hours later when Toshirou turned away from a TV news broadcast about a group of local scientists who had successfully attached working wings to a group of originally flightless mammals, as Kondo strode into the room with a woman in tow.

“Toshi,” he said warmly, “I wanted you to be the first to know. Otae-san and I are engaged to be married.”

“Look! Look!” Ketsuno Ana was crying through the TV. “The pigs are flying! They’re all flying!”

 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Kondo and his fiancée sat at the front of the meeting hall facing the rest of the Shinsengumi. No one spoke. Finally, Yamazaki tentatively raised a hand. He held it up in the air for a few seconds, unacknowledged, before slowly lowering it again. Everyone was still.

“Well, I don’t suppose introductions are necessary. We all know each other here,” Kondo said. “This is now a chance for all of us to get to know each other even better.”

“Yes,” Shimura Tae added with a wide smile, “I would very much like it if all of you would consider me to be your new big sister.”

The room sucked in a collective breath and let out a raucous cheer. Calls of ‘Congratulations, Commander!” and ‘Wow, it’s actually happening!’ and ‘Oh shit, this means I lost the office pool.’ echoed across the walls. Kondo grinned, took his woman’s hand, and… she let him.

With fingers that were having trouble keeping their grip on reality, Toshirou lit his 33rd cigarette of the day.

When the room settled down, Kondo cleared his throat in preparation to once again speak.

“Now,” he began warmly, “in the merging of two households, it is natural for some changes to come to pass. I would like all of you to try and consider these changes with a positive attitude as we move in the direction of becoming a stronger and fuller family.”

Kondo beamed.

“First off,” he said, “you will now hold all your combat practices at Otae-san’s… I mean, the Shimura Kodoukan Dojo.

“Second, you will only use their Kodoukan sword fighting style of Tendou Mushin not only in practice, but also during active duty. Whenever you use your weapon, you will do so using Otae-san’s… I mean, the Tendou Mushin style. We know this will not happen overnight, but the transition starts today.

“Third, if I am ever out of commission, you will consider the words of Shimura Tae to command you as mine would. As she is to become your sister-in-law, she will also be your commander-in-law.”

Shimura continued to smile, but the expression had somehow become chiller, more domineering. It was the smile of victory. Of the hunter who had their boot on the fox’s neck.

Toshirou lit his 35th cigarette, while resisting the urge to bang his head against the wall. This wasn’t a marriage; it was a corporate merger! And Kondo was cutting himself out of the whole business!

Someone tapped him roughly on the shoulder, and he glanced over to see Sougo staring a hole into the side of his head.

“This is all your fault,” Sougo said. “And don’t think that just because you added another body to the line of succession that I won’t focus on eliminating you first.”

“I think you’re just scared to point your bazooka in her direction,” Toshirou replied.

Sougo pretended not to hear him.

“Do you all understand?” Kondo was asking, too busy looking down at his hand holding hers to care about the atmosphere of the room.

“Yes, commander!” said a group of terrified troops.

“Love is a wonderful thing,” Kondo continued and looked up to meet eyes with his second-in-command. “Isn’t that so, Toshi?”

“Yes, Toshi, isn’t that so?” Kondo’s woman asked without asking.

 

* * *

 

“So now you realize that you have to fulfill your end of the bargain,” Shimura was telling him as the two of them walked through the light dusting of snow in the direction of Kabukicho.

“What are you talking about?” Toshirou asked. He still wasn’t sure why she’d singled him out to accompany her on her shopping trip. Wasn’t that supposed to be the husband-to-be’s duty?

“The only reason that gorilla was willing to sink low enough to sell his livelihood up the river to get hand holding privileges with me was because he was trying to impress you and the rest of his men,” Shimura said bluntly.

Giving away the Shinsengumi only got Kondo hand holding privileges? Toshirou was getting a terrible case of second-hand embarrassment. He reached for the bottle of mayonnaise in his uniform pocket, and held onto it for comfort.

“If this little stunt of his doesn’t help you get your girl, he might lose his nerve,” Shimura continued. “So get a girl.”

If everyone would leave Toshirou alone with his train stations, everything would be much better. Why did they all insist on trying to pin their own versions of happiness on his life?

“I was shot down,” he replied. “I would think you of all people would want men to understand that no means no.”

“Which is why I said get ‘a’ girl, not ‘the’ girl. It’s a good thing you never specified ‘the’ girl, because that means we can improvise. That’s what we’re shopping for today,” Shimura announced before waving cheerfully at the figure running hastily toward them. “Shin-chan!”

“Big sis!” glasses exclaimed, looking her over in concern. “Where have you been? You didn’t come home last night! The last time this happened you got engaged and we had to beat up a whole dojo for you.”

Shimura put her gloved hand on her brother’s flushed cheek and fluffy earmuff, patting lightly.

“Don’t you worry. This time I got engaged to a man who is giving us his dojo, so it would be counterproductive to trash it,” she said, jumping cheerfully into an explanation of the darker underbelly of her marriage deal.

By the end of it all, glasses was looking his way in clear sympathy, which Toshirou ignored in favor of lighting his 45th cigarette of the day. In exchange, the kid ignored Toshirou’s clear ‘fuck off’ signals and sidled up next to him.

In a low voice, glasses asked, “Why are you going along with this? My big sister may be strong, but she doesn’t have the best stamina. If you run fast enough, you could get away.”

After that ridiculous engagement announcement, Toshirou had thought about trying to put a stop to this farce up until the moment he saw Kondo sitting outside his sleeping quarters with Shimura at his side. They were softly conversing and watching the midday sun shine down on the nearby pond. Just like the pond, the man himself was glowing. All of a sudden, Shimura let out a soft laugh, and Kondo flushed red, wrung his hands, and looked about ready to spontaneously combust. Toshirou couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his commander so deeply and purely happy.

And he was here to protect what that man found to be important – what he valued.

Kondo had to know of the woman’s motivations, but he was content nevertheless. If hand holding privileges was what he wanted, and thinking that Toshirou had found hand holding privileges of his own made that better, he wasn’t going to fight this. He could find someone low maintenance who would keep the fridge well-stocked with mayonnaise and things would be fine. If anything, it would mean less distractions for his trains of thought.

“If this is what your sister wants, it’s what Kondo-san wants, and that means the Shinsengumi wants it too,” he replied simply.

“But this is all happening because Kondo-san wants you to be with the person you ca-care about, right?” glasses stumbled over the word, obviously embarrassed. “He’s wishing for your happiness and you’re just going to find someone to pretend at for the rest of your life?”

Pretending to be nice to people who rubbed him the wrong way was half of his job. If this girl liked mayo, it’d be a breeze.

“It’s none of your business,” he said, shooting a sharp glare in glasses’ direction.

“Hijikata-san,” glasses said, voice marveling. “You’re a good man.”

“Yes, just like that, Shin-chan,” the older Shimura said encouragingly. “We can use that. We’re going to need to talk Hijikata-san up enough to distract the hostesses from all of his mayonnaise.”

“The hostesses?”

Toshirou looked up to find himself standing in front of Shimura Tae’s place of work: Snack Smile.

“Yes,” she said brightly. “There’s an hour until we open here, so there’s a bit of time for a contest! I am going to ask the girls who would be up for getting hitched to a government lackey with a decent salary, and we should get a lot of takers. This is when we bring out a bunch of food and mayonnaise for Hijikata-san to eat and see who can stand being near him the longest.”

“That just sounds like a bunch of people bullying Hijikata-san about his food preferences!”

“What are you talking about, Shin-chan? It’ll be romantic! Like a Cinderella story! Which girl can fit the mayonnaise slipper lifestyle?”

“There’s never been such a disgusting Cinderella story! I won’t be a part of this!”

Ignoring the bickering siblings, Toshirou considered the plan and found it reasonable. Shimura was a sharp woman. Narrowing a group of people down to the one who saw the best of mayonnaise was a smart way to decide on a future partner. The better somebody thought of mayonnaise, the better they were as a person. That was just how the world worked. This way he would be able to find someone who was at least tolerable.

“So when do we start?” Toshirou asked.

 

* * *

 

With an anguished moan, the fifth hostess’s head hit the table with the dull thud of the unconscious.

“Miyu’s out at 2 minutes 57 seconds!” Shimura announced, putting Miyu’s time on the scoreboard she was making on the backs of cashed checks of old customers.

Toshirou grumbled mildly, continuing to work on his third Hijikata Special. How could people be passing out just by being near mayo? Pathetic. The smell of this almighty condiment was a perfume that heightened your senses! And speaking of mayo, this Hijikata Special really needed more of it. He squeezed half of his own bottle on top of the dish to the sound of gag reflexes in the distance like croaking frogs in spring.

Another woman slid into the booth and Shimura restarted her timer.

“Hijikata-han. May I have a bite?”

Toshirou actually looked up at the new hostess sitting next to him. The young woman wiped a hand across her forehead to gather and tuck a few long strands of brown hair behind her ears that had come loose from her bun then smiled at him nervously, biting her lip.

“Kirae! That’s a Hijikata Special! You might not survive!” Aya, who held the present record time of 4:04 and had just now woken up from her coma, yelled.

Kirae fidgeted, folding her hands together then unfolding them.

“Eating a dish is the first step in learning how to recreate it,” she said softly.

Toshirou’s heart leapt into his throat. She… wanted to try and cook Hijikata Specials? She… wanted to share Hijikata Specials… with him?

“That’s – yeah,” he said eloquently.

His whole face felt warm as he dug his chopsticks into his dish, came up with a mouthful, and leveled it her way. He alternated between staring at the far wall and at her lips as they came closer and closer to the mayo. His body thrummed with anticipation and he wondered if this could... if _she_ could possibly be someone that…

Her lips closed over the food and she chewed for one magical moment before her whole face turned blue and she went running for a trashcan.

“Kirae’s out at 38 seconds!”

Toshirou watched her go, expressionless, then returned to his food. Who wanted to share? This way he got to keep more for himself.

A few more women stepped up to bat, and a new record holder emerged in the form of Maho, who recited digits of pi under her breath with the intense concentration of a soldier attempting to withstand torture for five minutes until blacking out.

Resigning himself to a future with meals full of mathematical constants and poorly concealed disgust, Toshirou mechanically reached for the next Hijikata Special in the row only to find it wasn’t there. Instead, it was in the hands of one Sakata Gintoki who was, for some incomprehensible reason, now sitting next to him in this booth at Snack Smile stuffing his face with rice and mayonnaise.

It was the first time he’d laid eyes on the guy since he’d managed to shove Feelings for Yorozuya Station off the main line, and that very Yorozuya’s mouth was now full of mayonnaise. By choice. Fuck. Was he doing that on purpose? Toshirou really could have used some advance warning that this was going to happen. Maybe a week or two to prepare, let his feelings settle, and to practice neutral facial expressions in the mirror.

More importantly, why the hell was he even here in the first place?

Either he wandered into this booth purely by chance, which, considering how often they coincidentally and unwillingly ran into each other all across town over the years, wasn’t out of the question, or glasses must have gone and told him – though to what purpose, Toshirou had no idea.

“I heard there was free food.”

Oh, there it was.

“Although, nobody said it was dog food,” the Yorozuya added through another mouthful of mayo. Grimacing as he chewed, he continued, “Actually, on further reflection, I feel like I should apologize to Sadaharu. I wouldn’t wish this on him or any of his kind. Maybe on his turd. So let me restate.”

The Yorozuya put down his chopsticks and turned toward Toshirou with an expression of utmost seriousness.

“I heard there was free food,” he said. “Although, nobody told me it was dog shit food.”

Seeming satisfied with his announcement, the Yorozuya turned back to his bowl and rummaged about inside the sleeve of his kimono, drawing out a container of anko beans to pour on top of the special.

“Gin-san,” Shimura said in a tone that was mild, yet still carried a significant warning, “we’re in the middle of a contest and you’re interrupting.”

Without missing a beat, the Yorozuya replied, “Then it should be fine if I just take part. How many bowls do I have to eat to win?”

“This isn’t an eating contest, you idiot,” Toshirou said a bit more fondly than he had intended.

The last time he had seen the Yorozuya, he had told the guy he was in love with him. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Gintoki had started to act strange for a while after something like that; he wouldn’t have batted an eyelid even if the guy had gone out of his way to actively avoid him, but he wasn’t doing any of that wishy washy bullshit. He was acting like he always did. A lazy, selfish, pathetic, perpetually hungry idiot who, despite his whining, occasionally even got hungry enough to scarf down a Hijikata Special if there wasn’t enough of his shitty sugar in the fridge.

It was a relief to discover he wouldn’t have to lose this – whatever it was – on today of all days, when he might have a bride-to-be by evening. Something normal, natural, simple – something _easy_ , was profoundly welcomed.

“Oh, but it is an eating contest. There’s food to eat and there’s a contest, so eating contest,” Gintoki shot back, as he chewed lazily, open mouthed. “Shinpachi told me. He said there was this pathetic guy looking for dowry in mayo and I just had to come and see it with my own eyes. Could someone really sink that low?”

Toshirou took it all back. Who wanted this shithead around ever, at all? Not him.

The Yorozuya wasn’t here for a free meal. Or at least he wasn’t here _just_ for a free meal. He was also here to make fun of this. Toshirou didn’t know what else he should have expected after confessing his feelings to a known sadist.

“There’s nothing wrong with pairing off due to mayo preference,” he said defensively. The permhead could fuck off! “In the Heian period, brides of high status were often brought into other families with mayo dowries.”

“No, no,” Gintoki snorted, dismissively waving his chopsticks with a haughty look. “You’re thinking of the parfait dowries. The parfaits were placed inside red paper lanterns and hung from the ceiling of the bride’s house. The two merging families would stay inside the house for as long as it took for them to take down each lantern, one by one, and eat the parfaits inside. They say that Princess Tokushi’s family prepared a thousand parfait lanterns for Emperor Horikawa, and they were all so busy eating them for so long, which is why Emperor Shirakawa actually kept control of the government.”

“Why don’t you try opening a history book sometime?” Toshirou responded tartly. “It was mayo! Jars of mayo were carted over in wheelbarrows, and the number of wheelbarrows indicated your wealth and generosity. Incidentally, Fujiwara no Kenshi gave Emperor Shirakawa so many wheelbarrows of mayo that it kept him healthy and spry enough to overshadow the next two emperors. Also, legends say that Princess Kaguya brought eighteen hundred wheelbarrows with her to the Moon.”

“That’s impossible!” Gintoki argued as he shoved his chopsticks roughly into his second Hijikata Special. “Back in that day, the fuel costs for launching eighteen hundred wheelbarrows full of shit into space would have bankrupted the Moon people.”

“Your problem here is the fuel costs?” Toshirou asked derisively. The Yorozuya would try and poke holes in the dam that was preventing water from flooding his house if he thought it’d win him an argument. “Princess Kaguya is a super-powered celestial being. What the fuck does she care about the price of gas? And if you’re nitpicking, how would they keep the parfaits from melting in those stupid lanterns?”

“There’s something inside your head called a brain. It’s what people use to think. If you have one, you should try it out,” Gintoki said, sneering. “Obviously they hung blocks of ice next to the lanterns to keep them cold! The wealthy families would sometimes hire special ice sculptors to carve the ice into beautiful works of art. Princess Tokushi’s family hired their sculptor to turn the ice into frozen To-Do lists for Emperor Horikawa, so he would remember to try and run the country sometimes.”

“No, no, she reminded him of his duties by spelling them out in mayo over his meals. There is a famous painting of Tokushi writing out a mayo reminder for him to take out the trash on his morning omelet. Haven’t you seen it? They had it displayed at the Bunkamura recently.”

“I don’t know how you could possibly get things so wrong. It’s so pathetic that it’s just become plain sad,” Gintoki said patting his shoulder with a mocking pity. “It’s like when that kid gets 5% on the multiple choice quiz. If you’re completely guessing, you should get at least 25%! You have to really try hard to do as badly as you’re doing. Do you want a medal? Do you want a worst person award? Do you want an invitation to the Razzies?”

“Shut up,” Toshirou snapped and slapped his hand away. “You’re like the kid in class who tries to look at the smart kid’s answers during the test, but they know so little about the subject that the smart kid’s answers don’t seem right. You’re the kid that’s afraid to copy the smart kid’s answers because you can’t even judge how smart or stupid they are because nothing makes sense because you were up playing Nintendo all night instead of reading about the real, historical mayo dowries.”

“I think you mean the real, historical parfait dowries!”

Toshirou slammed a fist on the table. “No, I mean the real, historical mayo dowries!”

Gintoki slammed a boot on the table and threw his chopsticks at Toshirou’s head. “Parfait dowries!”

Toshirou caught the chopsticks with his teeth, licked off the mayo before biting them in half, and prepared for war with a cry of: “MAYO DOWRIES!”

“Actually, the dowries were made in shopping bags full of Bargain Dash,” another voice interjected.

It took a few seconds for Toshirou to remember he wasn’t in some late night eatery arguing with the Yorozuya about whether or not it rained last Thursday or last Wednesday (It had been Thursday.). No, instead they were both in a booth in Snack Smile arguing about whether or not Toshirou’s speed dating practices had historical precedent (Obviously, they did.). A subtle difference, to be sure, but one that had to be acknowledged.

Toshirou swiveled to see Shimura Tae, and just Shimura Tae, stretched out in the booth across from his. She was halfway through a bottle of Dom Pérignon that she was chugging straight from the source, while looking at him and the Yorozuya like they were mildly entertaining monkeys in a zoo. She had a strange upward quirk to her lips that Toshirou had a hard time classifying. Not that it mattered. There were more important things to focus on. For example:

“Where did everyone else go?” he asked.

“Oh, they all left once it was obvious Gin-san was going to be the winner,” Shimura said, gesticulating vaguely with the hand she had wrapped around the neck of the Dom Péri.

“What do you mean? He’s not even competing,” Toshirou said to Shimura before glaring at the Yorozuya, who had returned to lackadaisically digging away at his Hijikata Special with a new pair of chopsticks. “You’re not even competing.”

“Who says I’m not competing?” Gintoki mumbled through another mouthful.

Toshirou wasn’t sure what the Yorozuya’s angle was here. All he knew was that he didn’t like it.

He narrowed his eyes and said, “I say you’re not competing.”

“I definitely ate more shit than anyone else here,” Gintoki said, succeeding in sounding bored and indignant all at once. “Do you know how hard it is to keep that biohazard you insist on calling food in my stomach? I’m having to ignore all my natural, life-preserving instincts that are screaming at me to barf like no one has barfed before.”

“For the last time, this isn’t an eating contest!” Toshirou snapped and tried to take the Yorozuya’s bowl away only to almost get a chopstick to the eye for his trouble.

This guy was far too used to fighting dirty for his food. Gintoki successfully defended his current special, snatched two uneaten specials still in line, and slid to the far side of the booth, guarding his stash with the body language of a feral cat, hissing and all.

“Weren’t you just saying you could barely keep these down?” Toshirou accused.

Gintoki seemed to pause in a rare moment of self-reflection before saying, “Well, you were trying to take it away. What was I supposed to do? Actually let you?”

Was this guy five years old?

Giving up on the Yorozuya, he turned back to Shimura in an attempt to end this stupidity.

“He’s…” Toshirou attempted, “…he’s disqualified, so that would make Mahi the winner.”

Shimura just looked at him.

“Her name is Maho,” she said.

“Hey, hold on a second,” Gintoki drawled, monotone, as he chewed on the last bits of his third Hijikata Special. “You were the one who got down on your knees begging me to accept your feelings the other night. Just how fickle can you get?”

Don’t say it in such a misleading way, you son-of-a-bitch!

“Oh, so it was Gin-san?” Shimura put one hand to her cheek in the sort of fake wonderment kids use when opening presents on their birthday that they already found and opened in secret days before. “Why didn’t you just say so? Then we wouldn’t have had to trouble my friends at work.”

“No,” Toshirou tried, “don’t listen to him. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing here, but…”

Toshirou trailed off. So maybe he had confessed his feelings, yeah, but that wasn’t… it wasn’t… He’d been turned down, so it wasn’t like that! He just had to get that point across!

“I didn’t actually get down on my knees!” he exclaimed.

Shimura gave him another long look. She then took an equivalently long swig from the bottle of Dom Pérignon, finishing it off, as she slid out of the booth.

“Well, it seems like you two have it covered from here,” she said as she headed toward the back office. “You have ten minutes until we start prepping the room for customers. I’ll consider the price of this Dom Péri your rental fee.”

Suddenly realizing that woman was leaving with more than half of his monthly paycheck, Toshirou scrambled out of the booth to –

“Your money was gone the moment she opened that bottle,” Gintoki called out in what almost sounded like commiseration. “Don’t draw this out any more than you need to.”

In a way, the guy was right. He couldn’t get that money back. He also couldn’t start yelling at Kondo’s woman. But there was one asshole who deserved all the shit he could dish out and more – the one reason his wallet and pride were in tatters with nothing to show for it. Toshirou turned to give an evil eye to the fucker still in the booth.

The Yorozuya finished his third bowl and belched into the silence. Toshirou really hoped he’d learned to enjoy the taste of that meal, because now he was going to punch the Yorozuya in the stomach hard enough to the return the flavor to his mouth for a second go.

He clicked his tongue in disappointment as the Yorozuya casually dodged his fist.

“What’s with the temper tantrum?” Gintoki asked with a wholly unimpressed expression that made Toshirou see red. “You pass me a note in class saying you ‘like-like’ me and here I am accepting your stupid feelings. You should be ecstatic. You should be jumping for joy. Why don’t you try it? Try jumping.”

The Yorozuya made dismissive flicking motions with his fingers.

Where was this shitty, cavalier attitude coming from, anyway? The guy was traumatized enough by Toshirou’s confession to go involuntarily mute last time, but now here he was treating the situation with the same amount of gravity one might give to the decision of pizza toppings, and that fucker would be the type of lowlife to order pineapple on his for sure.

“What the hell are you playing at?”

“I’m saying I’ll go out with you – in a steamy bathhouse, Turkish oil wrestling, guy’s locker room after hours kind of way,” Gintoki said with a sharp, predatory smile, teeth gleaming like knives under the low lighting. “That’s what you wanted, right, Hijikata- _kun_?”

Not really.

“Are you an idiot?” Toshirou asked, for lack of anything better to say. The guy really sounded like an idiot.

Whatever prank he was pulling, or blackmail he was trying to collect, or sadist torture scenario he was trying to enact, Toshirou wasn’t going to follow along. Just because the Yorozuya had his own train station didn’t mean Toshirou was going to trip over himself trying to fulfill his every, shitty whim.

However, strangely enough, Gintoki only grinned wider, as if Toshirou had given him just what he wanted.

“No, you’re the idiot,” he said triumphantly. “You really must be a total idiot if you thought I wouldn’t realize that you never actually expected me to say yes to you that night.”

Toshirou sucked in an involuntary breath. Could the Yorozuya have really figured out his goal of solidifying his unrequited feelings? How could that be possible? Who expects anyone to head up to bat with the intention of striking out?

“That’s not true,” he denied with force.

Undeterred, the Yorozuya stepped out of the booth and stalked toward him with the cocky swagger of someone who had figured out the culprit halfway through a murder mystery dinner party.

“It was obvious. When you were putting on that stupid black coat of yours with that hole in the left sleeve, right after you said your whole,” – Gintoki pushed the front of his own perm down into a mockery of v-bangs and set his face in an irritating scowl – “‘Unlike some of the stalkers out there, I only ask once,’ line when you assumed I shot you down, you smiled like you were relieved. What kind of person does that?”

The Yorozuya snorted and, with a somewhat self-conscious, entirely overdone shrug, added, “Not that I gave any thought to what you did that night, really. Have we even met up lately? I can’t remember. What’s your name again? Actually, don’t answer that because I don’t care.”

That guy had obviously been giving Toshirou’s words a whole bunch of fucking thought! But why? Why did he have to focus on the small, minuscule, unimportant details? So maybe Toshirou had smiled a bit as everything went according to plan? Why did that have to mean anything?

“That wasn’t relief,” he said quickly, grasping about for a legitimate excuse. “I was putting on a strong face for you.”

“Liar,” Gintoki sneered. “You looked like you’d just taken the most satisfying shit of your life. You weren’t bearing anything! Is this your fetish? Do you confess to people and then get off when they turn you down? And I thought I’d seen it all!”

The Yorozuya’s upper lip curled as he glared at Toshirou like he was looking at a bug half-submerged in one of his parfaits. Toshirou had actually seen him use this look in that exact circumstance before, which is why he knew the comparison was accurate.

So what? This guy thought he had used him in some sort of sex play thing? And was offended? That ninja stalker of his does that sort of thing to him constantly and he treats it with the severity of a dog humping the furniture: something disgusting that occasionally warrants a scolding. It never seemed to be enough for him to actually… eat multiple Hijikata Specials and hijack a mayo-compatibility competition in order to voice his displeasure.

The Yorozuya’s words and actions and underlying intent were jumbled and messy in a way that left Toshirou confused.

But whatever his reasons for getting up in arms, it didn’t matter. Toshirou’s whole goal from asking the guy out had been to get shot down honestly, and apparently that wasn’t quite what happened. He couldn’t count his feelings as resolved and unrequited until he got this dumb shit to actually believe they existed in the first place.

How tiresome. And just when he thought he’d put all this behind him too.

“Don’t just go making assumptions about me, asshole,” he said. “I asked you out because I fell for you. That’s not up for debate, so stop griping and whining, and accept it.”

Gintoki’s glower cracked into a smile that somehow seemed far more dangerous. He put a heavy hand on Toshirou’s shoulder that, while only squeezed lightly, ten grown men working together would probably have had trouble removing.

“Oh, really? You’re still sticking with that story, huh?” the Yorozuya asked in the same kind of tone people use to reassure patients with dementia. “Well, let’s do it then. Take things to the next level.”

“What?”

“Unless,” the Yorozuya murmured with terrible cheer, “you really aren’t serious, and are just faking to pull one over on poor old Gin-san.”

Why the fuck would he be doing that? What fucking purpose would that serve? Does Gintoki really think he’s that much of an asshole? And is he really ready to play a hardcore game of gay chicken just to catch Toshirou out on the lie-that-isn’t-a-lie?

Toshirou gnashed his teeth together, while Gintoki smiled beatifically.

How is he supposed to convince this sugar freak of the truth when the idiot only makes the stupidest assumptions and can’t connect the dots even with step-by-step instructions right in front of his goddamn face?

Well. There is the obvious way…

“Of course I’m serious,” Toshirou replied, smiling and rustling the Yorozuya’s hair in a way that caused a couple of sukonbu wrappers and half of an old lotto ticket to escape the curls and flutter around them like a poor man’s confetti. “So that’s it then. We’re involved. Unless… you were just saying you wanted to because you were sure I didn’t.”

The problem with playing gay chicken with a guy who’s gay for you is that you are going to lose at some point. Toshirou’s victory was assured here, and then his plan of feeling one-sided love for this shithead could proceed as planned. The only question that remained was just how far this idiot was willing to go to prove his incorrect point, but it couldn’t really be that far. Surely the Yorozuya had better things to do.

 

* * *

 

Toshirou sat with Gintoki at the front of the meeting hall facing the rest of the Shinsengumi. No one spoke. Finally, Yamazaki tentatively raised a hand. He held it up in the air for a few seconds, unacknowledged, before slowly lowering it again. Everyone was still.

“Well, I don’t suppose introductions are necessary. We all know each other here,” Toshirou said. “This is now a chance for you to get to know each other outside of criminal investigations in which this guy’s been marked as a suspicious individual.”

“Yeah,” Sakata Gintoki added, picking his nose with aplomb, “go ahead and think of me as your new big bro.”

The room was dead silent. The Yorozuya grinned and took his hand, which Toshirou would have snatched away if Kondo hadn’t chosen that moment to start bawling.

“Love is a wonderful thing,” Kondo said and looked up through his tears to meet eyes with his second-in-command who was just at that moment realizing Gintoki was putting a booger in his palm. “Isn’t that so, Toshi?”

“Yes, Toshi, isn’t that so?” the fucking perm asked.

 

 

 

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

More often than not, Toshirou’s dreams got the jump on him. Not his daydreams – like the ones he sometimes had when sitting down on a bench somewhere on a break during his patrol, where he would idly imagine that if he just reached under the bench he would find a solid gold mayonnaise statue with a mysterious map on the back – not those. No, the dreams he got when he fell asleep were the problem.

He never managed to wrangle any sort of control of the setting, the plot, the characters, or anything from his subconscious mind. He was never so much as consulted on artistic direction. It was a pretty shitty deal.

If he watched the wrong Studio Tribli movie while eating one too many digestive biscuits before going to sleep, he might find himself hurtling across the countryside in a moving castle made of wafers, while trying to stop bird-Kondo from eating a hole in the wall, because at the speeds they were going any sort of opening was definitely going to make things really fucking drafty.

He didn’t understand why it never occurred to him in those dreams that anything was out of place – that it wasn’t real life. Apparently his disbelief was suspended somewhere up there in the stratosphere when he was sleeping, and there were no amounts of giant bug armies or sentient boogers that could bring it back down. Nothing ever managed to tip him off that it was what it was: a dream.

Well, almost nothing.

There was only one thing that had him realizing he was dreaming while he was still in the middle of it. There was only one thing that worked, and it worked without fail.

It was when Mitsuba showed up.

If he saw her, he knew instantly that he was dreaming, because there wasn’t an atom in his body that would ever mistake her for anything else but dead.

This is why he tried flapping his arms, experimentally, when he saw her this time. He remembered reading somewhere that when people became aware that they were dreaming they could make themselves fly, and that sounded fun.

He heard her laugh, but he refused to look in her direction.

“Just because you know you’re dreaming doesn’t mean you can do anything about it,” she said.

Toshirou closed his eyes and thought hard about being a pterodactyl.

…

It didn’t work.

But why the hell not? Sougo would often cheerfully describe to anyone who would listen during breakfast all the ways he had consciously morphed his own dreams into merciless torture hellscapes for any Hijikata Toshirous that occupied them. Yesterday his demise had apparently involved two cheese graters, a bag of jellybeans, and a coat hanger. If Toshirou had to die horrifically in other people’s dreams, why couldn’t he at least do some cool stuff in his own?

“How long has it been since you dreamt of me?” Mitsuba asked.

A long fucking time, Toshirou didn’t say.

Mitsuba answered in his stead: “The last ones were in the months after I died. You had quite a few of those. Do you remember why?”

“You died. Of course I dreamed of you,” he huffed.

Rehashing this was stupid. Actually, more to the point, this whole thing was just stupid.

“You know that’s not true,” she said.

He looked up at her, and immediately regretted it. She was too goddamn vivid – sitting in the seat across from him with her hands folded delicately in her lap, as she looked out the window smiling that soft, disarming smile. A thin bar of sunlight traveled down her cheek, to her chin, to her neck, ending at her shoulder. The train was idling at the station.

“The dreams weren’t because of what happened; they were because of what didn’t,” Mitsuba continued. “There were words left unsaid, and there was nowhere left to say them.”

Toshirou began fiddling with the window latch. Really, it was okay that he couldn’t fly in this dream. He was willing to compromise. As long as he could just open this window and jump out of it – preferably directly onto an electrocuted rail –, he would be good.

“So why have the dreams come back now, I wonder?” Mitsuba mused aloud.

Damn, this was tough. What was the seven-letter combination for the lock on the window again?

“Either word could work,” Mitsuba offered. “Admittedly, one’s probably a little easier than the other at this point.”

Toshirou, who had just been flipping through different letter combinations at random hoping to get lucky, stopped for a moment to be confused. How could there be two ways to unlock a window? Why were difficulty levels involved?

“Or you could just stay here and try to ignore it, like you’ve always done,” she said. “Although, if you ask me, you’ve been sitting in this place for far too long. It’s time to get going.”

“Toshi, come on,” Kondo said earnestly, shaking him roughly by the shoulders. “It’s time to get going.”

Toshirou shot up in bed, nearly slamming his head into Kondo’s, who scrambled back just in time, laughing cheerily all the while.

“You seemed to be sleeping so deeply and peacefully that I’m sorry I had to wake you, but it’s time to rise and shine!” Kondo said.

Shit. Had he overslept? He was sure he set his alarm. Had Sougo messed with it? What time was it anyway? Toshirou glanced quickly over to the clock on his wall to check the time. He paused.

“Kondo-san,” he said. “It’s 2 am.”

“Yeah, I know,” Kondo replied with a touch of sheepishness, “but I thought it would be a good idea to get an early start today. This will be our first morning practice at Otae-san’s dojo! The Shinsengumi should be across town waiting in her yard and ready to begin the moment her eyelashes start to flutter and the birds sing her good morning!”

“Kondo-san,” Toshirou said again, looking into the eyes of a child whose parents told him that they were going to Disneyland. He looked into the eyes of a child that would not sleep until he rode the Matterhorn three times and took a perfect photo op with Mickey Mouse.

“Yes, Toshi?” Kondo asked, physically vibrating with joy.

“I’ll wake up the men,” Toshirou said.

 

* * *

 

Toshirou had to hand it to his commander. Once they arrived at Shimura’s dojo, practice swords in hand, things actually went relatively smoothly for the first hour. Nobody was breaking any limbs, or getting force-fed strange dark matter, or fearing for the lives any more than was normal during a morning practice. That first hour went fine.

The second hour was when everything fell apart.

At the sound of the gunshot, everyone paused in their drills to look in the direction of the noise. There was Kondo on the floor, pale and shaking, with a bullet buried in the ground mere inches from his groin.

“Kondo,” Matsudaira Katakuriko growled, approaching the man with his smoking gun and smoking cigarette. “A little birdy told me you made some operational  _changes_ to the Shinsengumi. You know you’re supposed to ask me first so I can tell you  _no_.”

“P-pops!” Kondo stuttered, scrambling to his feet. “This is just… morale building! I wanted to give my men a little change of pace.”

Matsudaira kept walking forward until he was right in front of Kondo. When he stopped, his long coat continued to sway and blow about despite there being no actual breeze to make that possible. He stared at Kondo for a long moment, before hefting up the gun and pointing it right between his eyes.

“My  _morale_  is not feeling very  _built_ ,” he said.

Matsudaira clicked off the safety.

“My  _morale_  prefers the status _quo_ ,” he said.

Matsudaira took a large drag from his cigarette and blew out a breath of smoke right into Kondo’s face.

“But, if your men are really jonesing for a change of pace, I suppose I could give them one,” he said, smashing his gun into Kondo’s temple. “What do you think,  _Kondo_? Should I give them a change of pace?”

Laughing manically, Kondo started to shake his head, which jiggled the gun glued to it precariously enough that the whole yard sucked in a breath. Toshirou was not at all interested in a promotion right now.

“No, no! That’s not necessary!” Kondo yelped. “Now that I think about it, we all really like the status quo a lot, actually. Let’s just stick with that!”

Matsudaira wiggled his gun around, dragging it back and forth across Kondo’s forehead.

“You’re sure?” he asked.

Kondo nodded like his life depended on it – which it probably did.

“Okay then. Status quo it _is_ ,” Matsudaira proclaimed as he lowered his gun, and the onlookers let out that breath they had all been holding. Well, everyone except for one person.

“I suppose this means our deal’s off, gorilla,” Shimura said.

He may have just dodged a headshot, but Kondo looked like he’d taken a bullet right to the heart this time.

“Otae-san! Don’t say that,” he pleaded, running in her direction. “We can work something out!”

Dropping her wooden sword on the ground, she retreated into her house without a second glance. When Kondo slid open the door to follow her, an arm flew out to punch him in the face, sending him flying right back into the waiting arms of the status quo – and the bushes.

Matsudaira blew out another exaggerated puff of smoke and began walking back in the direction of his car idling at the entrance gate. It seemed as though his business was done until he was about to pass by Toshirou, but didn’t.

“And Toshi,” he said.

Matsudaira stood in front of Toshirou like he had stood in front of Kondo earlier, and maybe it was for the same kind of reason. If he had been in the loop about Kondo’s deal with Shimura, he probably also knew about Toshirou’s stupid thing with a permy sugar addict who was vaguely connected with numerous government terrorist movements. Toshirou was probably about to get a gun to the forehead too.

And this could actually work out in his favor. If Matsudaira gave him the choice between the Shinsengumi and the Yorozuya, that gave him an easy, legitimate excuse to never pursue his own feelings! This was perfect, actually!

“Yes?” Toshirou asked, struggling to tamper down his excitement as he waited for the inevitable ultimatum.

Matsudaira patted him on the shoulder and winked. “Keep up the good work.”

_WHY?!_

Toshirou could only stare blankly at Matsudaira’s back as it disappeared into the car, taking the natural world order along with it.

“Wow,” Sougo enthused from underneath the shade of the tree he’d been sleeping in to skip out on morning practice. “Pops Matsudaira gave you his blessing to date the Yorozuya’s danna. Aren’t you the luckiest homo.”

“Idiot!” Toshirou sputtered, head spinning. “That’s not what he was talking about. He was obviously referencing my work in Kanazawa last week.”

“But you only dragged us down that time, like you do every time, you horrible piece of shit Hijikata-san,” Sougo drawled. “He has no reason to lie to you like that.”

“Shut up, Sougo.”

“Stop existing, Hijikata. Here, I’ll even help you get started,” Sougo said, lifting his as-of-yet unused wooden sword.

 

* * *

 

The Yorozuya slid open the door and stared at him.

“What’s with the black eye?”

“Terrorists,” Toshirou muttered quickly, before shoving the subject under the rug where it would hopefully suffocate and die. “Now let me in. I’ve come to see you.”

It had been just about four days since Toshirou got his hand-holding privileges, which was five days too many. He added on an extra day to the total amount as interest on the debt karma owed him, because karma had been an over-the-top asshole recently.

Toshirou hadn’t even crossed paths once with the Yorozuya since that first day, but in the few moments he wasn’t spending putting out fires among the higher ups over the shogun graffiti spree and Kondo’s attempt to donate the Shinsengumi to the Shimuras, he found his trains of thought ceaselessly meandering toward Feelings for Yorozuya Station. He brushed a piece of white lint off his jacket last night and his mind didn’t find its way back to the report on his desk for a good ten minutes. One of the train conductors recently mentioned to him that they were busy renovating the Yorozuya’s station to make it big enough to accommodate more traffic, which he responded to with the highest level of professionalism he could muster by hitting his head repeatedly against the nearest wall.

This was the exact opposite of how he wanted everything to go.

Realizing that the rest of the world was trying its best to be of as little help to him as possible, Toshirou decided to take care of this in the way he did best: by hitting his head – metaphorically this time – against the problem wall until that wall crumbled or he died of blood loss – whichever came first. In this case, the wall was the Yorozuya’s shitty determination that there was something to be gained here. Whatever stakes, whatever pride, whatever half-assed delusions had this fuckwit leaning against his own doorframe and sending a sleazy wink in Toshirou’s direction, Toshirou was going to find them all and tear them to pieces.

“Tone down those dilated pupils and take it easy,” Gintoki said. “Kagura’s home. No room to bring out the Twister mat with you – as much as I might want to. Hearing you lie about where you got your black eye is really turning me on right now.”

“I’m not here for Twister,” Toshirou replied before realizing his mistake.

Dammit! Now the Yorozuya was going to think he had the upper hand in this! He could accuse Toshirou of not wanting him, and strut around feeling like the gayer chicken! Toshirou had to course correct – and fast!

“Not that I don’t want to play Twister,” he added quickly. “I would left-hand red and right-foot green with you at any opportunity. It is always hard to resist you, because you’re so…” Toshirou trailed off, staring at the dead-eyed, frizzy-haired, shit-talking, dirty excuse for a samurai, as he tried to remember, in the heat of this moment, why he ever thought the guy had any redeeming qualities. At a loss, he went with: “Permy. But despite your perm, I will hold myself back and be good to you.”

The Yorozuya glowered.

“It’s actually  _me_  that’s holding  _myself_  back,” he said huffily. “I’m glad you haven’t noticed, because that means I’m doing well at it. I am here to treasure you, Hijikata-kun, and as much as I want to pillage the treasure chest, I won’t. I will stand guard by your family jewels, keeping them safe until you are ready to let me polish them.”

 _That’s right, Yorozuya. Keep talking._   _Keep talking your way right into my trap!_

The Yorozuya might think they were playing a game of verbal checkers, but this was chess! Not just chess, 3D chess! Each move Toshirou made on the main board was in preparation for a killer ambush three turns down the line on chessboards the Yorozuya didn’t even know existed! This guy had already talked himself into a checkmate, and he didn’t even know it.

“I guess we’re both holding ourselves back, because we’re just that into each other,” Toshirou said with a sharp smile. “That being said, I can’t help but notice that you don’t really seem to want me coming inside your place. Now, don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind standing out here in the cold with you, because my feelings for you keep me warm, but I need to know: do you not want your kid knowing about us? Are you ashamed?”

Toshirou turned his back on the Yorozuya to rest his elbows on the porch railing, letting out a shit-eating grin. This was definitely checkmate. Sometimes Gintoki would put on airs and bluster at the late night bars, but was he really willing to bring this bullshit into his own home?

Toshirou lit a cigarette and waited for his win. He wondered how it would sound. Would the Yorozuya stutter and make excuses, would he snap and admit it was all a farce, or would he just slam the door, leaving Toshirou alone for a nice victory smoke?

“Kagura!” Gintoki called out.

“What?”

“I’m dating the mayo freak!”

“That’s disgusting,” came the reply. Then, “Can I have the last pudding?”   

“Wake up at seven to go with Shinpachi to that time sale tomorrow, and you’ve got a deal.”

“Okay!”

Toshirou heard rather than saw the Yorozuya sidle up next to him, and felt an arm slip around his shoulders. This was the same arm that had just flipped over all the chess boards, and sent the pieces on them careening into space. Fucking cheater.

“I can see why you told the whole Shinsengumi about us. What a great feeling,” Gintoki said, and Toshirou heard rather than saw the shit-eating grin on his face. “I could do some more of that if you’re up for it. We could take a train to Bushu and tell all your relatives!”

Toshirou would rather take a train to the bottom of the ocean.

“As much as I appreciate that sentiment,” he said through gritted teeth, “don’t you think it’s a little unfair? If we tell my relatives, where do we go to tell yours?”

Gintoki hummed, tapping his fingers lightly against Toshirou’s collarbone.

“We’ll just have to get creative,” he finally said. “If you spot any people with silver hair we can just assume they’re related to me and tell them about our relationship.”

“That’s pretty much every old person!”

“Well, I don’t see you coming up with a better solution!” Gintoki snapped. “What, do you not want them to know about us?”

“Who? The entire elderly population of Edo?”

“Do you have something to hide? Because I’ll tell you this, Hijikata-kun, Gin-san may be many things, but he is not a secret you get to keep!” Gintoki declared.

In under a minute, the Yorozuya had not only successfully dodged Toshirou’s ‘Are You Ashamed?’ offensive, he had also parried back with a ‘You Don’t Get to Keep Me a Secret!’ full frontal assault! The Yorozuya used Toshirou’s own strategy against him, but with twice the strength!

Toshirou had thought they were playing 3D chess, but was it really a game of 4D chess?! Had the Yorozuya been playing on chess boards in dimensions that Toshirou had not even imagined were there? Had he anticipated the strategies Toshirou had thought he had been forming in secret, and formed his own even more super-secret strategies?! How was that possible?!

It was moments like these that made him realize he was really dealing with the legendary warrior and fearsome former Joui,  _Shiroyasha_.

“I’m not some side whore!” Gintoki yelled.

“I’m not hiding this! I’m not hiding you!” Toshirou replied, desperately trying to think of a way to regain the upper hand.

“Well, you don’t really seem to want to tell people, which would only make sense if you don’t actually want to be with me,” Gintoki said triumphantly.

If Toshirou had been able to take the time to admire it, he might even call it masterful – the way this shit stain had so quickly and efficiently closed off every opportunity, shot every weapon out of his hands. Swallowing heavily, Toshirou knew there was not even time for fear. There was only one path, just one option left for him to try. It was called Double-the-Fuck-Down.

“Fine,” he said, taking the hand resting on his shoulder in his own, intertwining their goddamn fingers fucking lovingly. “Let’s go to bingo night at every retirement home, every occupied hospital bed, every early morning farmer’s market, and tell them all! Better yet, let’s just buy a billboard in the center of the city so everyone can know!”

“Why stop there?” Gintoki challenged. “Let’s buy some ad time on TV! LET’S BUY A BLIMP!”

“Will you shut the hell up?!” an old, raspy voice called out from below. “Stop screaming in the middle of the afternoon. You’re bothering the whole street!”

The Yorozuya unwrapped himself from around Toshirou to lean over the railing. Toshirou peered down as well to find the old woman who ran the snackhouse downstairs glaring up at the both of them.

“Here’s another person to tell,” the Yorozuya said with an impish grin to Toshirou before waving downward. “Hey, granny! I’m dating this guy!”

The old woman’s glare ramped up a few notches.

“Gintoki. What have I told you about blackmailing police officers?”

“Why is your first thought blackmail?” Gintoki asked, smacking the railing in offense then jabbing Toshirou roughly in the cheek. “This guy asked  _me_!”

“Really?”

There was nothing Toshirou could do but nod his assent to that one.

At this, the old woman’s suspicion appeared to give way to something close to concern.

“I’m not sure what to say,” she began, brow furrowed as she looked at Toshirou. “Somehow, I’m sorry.”

His cigarette slipped out of his hands as a surprising warmth flooded him. These were the words he hadn’t realized he had been waiting for. Finally! A person was sympathizing with his dilemma. The last few weeks had been rough, and it felt good to have someone acknowledge that. Toshirou coughed and turned away to hide the soft pleasure that seemed determined to creep its way into the corners of his lips.

“It’s okay,” he replied. “I think I’ve come to terms with it.”

 “Oi!” Gintoki shouted. “You two! Why are you acting like he just got diagnosed with a terminal illness?!”

Huh, an accurate comparison! Toshirou was glad the Yorozuya was starting to understand things.

“Don’t you dare look at me like you agree with that!” Gintoki yelled.

 

* * *

 

“Well, I guess this is marginally better than the clown thing,” Kagura said.

In response to the first words that had been spoken by anyone in the room for a full minute, Toshirou asked, “What clown thing?” at the same time that Gintoki snapped, “There was never a clown thing!”

Toshirou turned his gaze away from the little girl manspreading on the couch across from him as she licked the lid of the pudding cup, and looked over at the guy manspreading on the couch next to him as he stared enviously at the little girl licking the lid of the pudding cup.

After they had taken things inside, he and the Yorozuya had reached somewhat of a stalemate, drinking some tea – if you could call the Yorozuya’s sugar mountain sprinkled with water ‘tea’ – and sitting next to each other in a prickly silence as China ate the Yorozuya’s last pudding and stared at the both of them.

Toshirou had been hitting his head against this problem of a wall for so long and yet there were no dents to be found. Why was it so damn hard to get this guy to admit he didn’t actually want to tango? The Yorozuya was not backing down no matter what he did, and, as much as Toshirou hated to admit it, he was at a loss.

Whatever subject this girl was bringing up would probably be better than nothing, particularly because the Yorozuya seemed to want no part of it.

“What clown thing?” Toshirou asked again.

“Ah, it seems you’re as bad at listening to my words as Kagura,” the Yorozuya said darkly. “When I say there was never a clown thing, that’s me saying there was never a clown thing!”

“There was definitely a clown thing,” China said. “A couple weeks ago, he started having nightmares about it. He kept waking up in the middle of the night screaming about the ‘smiley son-of-a-bitch’.”

“Oh?” Toshirou said gleefully. This sounded fun. “Clowns keeping you up, Yorozuya?”

“No! That’s… that’s not what happened,” Gintoki insisted, glaring at Kagura like he was mentally trying to push her mute button. “I was doing late night vocal exercises, because I was training to audition for Edo’s Got Talent. Smiley Son-of-a-Bitch is my song.”

China stopped idly chewing on the pudding lid.

“So that’s where you went off to those nights!” she exclaimed. “Those were Edo’s Got Talent auditions?”

Gintoki lifted his mug, crossed his legs, and put the mug back down on the table without drinking. He refused to make eye contact with anyone else in the room. Down to the beads of sweat on his brow, he was acting exactly like the shifty perp in the interrogation room who knew the cops were onto something. Toshirou wondered if he was actually going to have to arrest this guy today.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Yorozuya said, sniffing.

“You were getting those nightmares and then you started sneaking out in the middle of the night last week, so I got worried!” China said in the tone of a harassed mother. “Shinpachi and I tailed you once, but all you did was pace up and down Hanazono Ichiban Street in Golden Gai.”

The Yorozuya’s eyes flicked over to meet Toshirou’s waiting stare, before quickly shifting back the other way. While his expression remained carefully neutral, the tips of his ears were turning pink again just like they had that night a couple weeks back at the bar – the bar that also happened to be on Hanazono Ichiban Street.

What had the Yorozuya been doing prowling around that area last week? That was when Toshirou and most of the Shinsengumi had been over in Kanazawa. Everyone had tried to keep the Kanazawa trip under wraps because of the delicate politics involved, but had the Yorozuya somehow known that they would be gone and planned to take advantage of the lack of government muscle to do something shady?

“Were you trying to work up the courage to go in to your Edo’s Got Talent audition?” China asked. “If you’d just told me, I would have held your hand and helped you be brave, you know.”

“I didn’t need your help. I did just fine!” Gintoki muttered.

“There wouldn’t be an Edo’s Got Talent audition around there,” Toshirou said. He had been spending his rare nights off getting a few drinks in the bars around Golden Gai as of late, so he knew the area pretty well – well enough to know that the Yorozuya was talking out of his ass.

“Maybe there was an audition!” Gintoki countered. “Maybe they just didn’t want a talentless hack like you coming around so no one told you about it!”

“It definitely wasn’t this Edo’s Got Talent bullshit,” Toshirou confirmed with narrowed eyes. This was obviously a cover story, but what exactly was it covering up? There was something going on that the Yorozuya didn’t want his kid or Toshirou knowing about – something that even this guy, who considered picking his nose a power move, would be ashamed of.

After a few more moments of deliberation, Toshirou asked, “So was it actually the clown thing then?”

Gintoki slammed his mug on the table and snarled, “NO! FOR THE LAST TIME! There was no clown thing!”

“Then what were you actually doing there?” China asked.

The room went silent.

“Okay, it was the clown thing,” Gintoki said finally.

“I knew it!” China crowed in victory. “It was stalking your dreams, so you went to hunt it down, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Gintoki replied. “Let’s just go with that.”

Ignoring the Yorozuya’s vague mumblings of agreement, Toshirou instead found himself fixating on China’s phrasing. There was something about all this that was niggling at his intuition – something that gave him reason to think there was something deeper going on here than what the Yorozuya was admitting to on the surface. It had to do with the way she phrased it… it…

IT.

“By it do you mean… IT?” Toshirou asked in alarm. “Was this an IT situation?”

He had actually gone with Harada to see IT when it was first playing in theaters. Well, he had seen the first few minutes of it, at least. He got a very important phone call to do a very important thing just after the start of the movie. His phone was on silent like all other respectful movie goers, which was why Harada didn’t hear any call, but that didn’t mean the call didn’t happen. And it was an important call. A very important call.

Long story short, Toshirou had seen IT and afterwards knew it was imperative to develop an IT Protocol for the Shinsengumi. If a clown beast like that ever ended up in Edo, the Shinsengumi needed to have a plan in place. He recapped those first few minutes of the movie to Kondo and found his commander to be in enthusiastic agreement with this.

In the months following the movie, they made the men run weekly IT drills in preparation. These drills mostly involved them going up to random civilians and informing them that they should never chase paper boats floating down any streets toward storm gutters on rainy days, and that a representative from the Shinsengumi would make them a replacement paper boat if they ever lost one they felt emotionally attached to. It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it would have to do.

And now everything was starting to make sense. The Yorozuya was an idiot, but he wouldn’t be afraid of just any old clown. If they were talking about that IT clown though…

“You should have called the cops. That’s not a situation a civilian should be handling on their own,” Toshirou said, glancing at the Yorozuya’s right arm as it lay draped on the couch next to Toshirou’s left, definitely still in one piece. That was a good sign.

“Didn’t seem like there were any tax thieves around that week to deal with even the simplest requests their humble civilians might make of them, let alone IT situations,” the Yorozuya said, sending a significant look Toshirou’s way. “Seemed like I was all by myself.”

“That’s when it gets you!” Toshirou exclaimed.

“I took care of it!” Gintoki snapped. “I found out about his intense fear of cats and used that against him during the big parade.”

“That seems like more of a Cowboy Bebop situation than an IT situation,” China commented.

“Po-tay-to, po-tah-to,” the Yorozuya drawled. “What does it matter? It’s done. It’s over. We can stop talking about it now. Let’s change the subject. How was your day at school, Kagura?”

“I don’t go to school, Gin-chan,” she replied. “Anyway, I’m glad it’s done too. It was fun having you so out of it during the day that I could play games like seeing how many pieces of trash I could put in your hair before you noticed, but it’s good to have you back.”

“Oh, that’s why he had all that garbage in his hair lately?” Toshirou asked, remembering that ill-fated rendezvous at Snack Smile four days back when he and the Yorozuya had decided to duke it out, romance style. He had fluffed the guy’s hair then, and all kinds of shit had come raining out. At the time, Toshirou had thought that was just the Yorozuya’s natural, trashy state of being. How could he have possibly realized that it was actually a symptom of a fearsome, days long clown showdown?

“Yeah, it was the clown thing,” China said. “He was wandering around all night, and then he would come home and spend the day at his desk dozing off and grumbling about the smiley guy. I could usually get about 10 pieces of trash in his hair before he started scratching his head and getting them out. I’m not sure if he actually noticed they were there, or if his body was just relying on lower level survival instincts at that point.”

“I hope you had fun taking advantage of a man when he was down!” the Yorozuya growled, reflexively combing through his hair with his fingers.

“I did,” China replied with a grin.

If she was willing to tease the Yorozuya about it all, the clown thing must not have been too serious. That, or the Yorozuya had been careful enough to keep the full plot from her.

Either way, the guy’s point that Toshirou had not been around stuck with him. It had his trains of thought zooming toward the hypotheticals and might-have-beens – toward monsters in the shadows, missing persons, and the ripped tatters of a white and blue kimono stained blood red and tucked away in a small, cold evidence box. Apparently his mind did things like irrationally worry about this piece of shit now.

Taking a pen and a recently emptied cigarette pack out of his uniform pocket, he wrote down his cell phone number on the back of the carton. He had never given this number out to someone outside the Shinsengumi before, but it seemed like it was the right time.

“Gintoki,” Toshirou said. “Call me the next time something like that happens.”

The Yorozuya squinted warily at the pack Toshirou was holding out to him like it was a bomb he would have to defuse. Finally, he sighed loudly, pinched it between two fingers, and threw the pack roughly over to his desk, where it slid to a halt just soon enough not to fall over the edge.

“Fine. If it gets the two of you off my back, I’ll call Mr. Policeman the moment the evil clowns come crawling out of the sewers.”

Just imagining that scenario was enough to make Toshirou want to throw up everything he had eaten today –  _including_ mayonnaise –, but he also felt strangely relieved.

“Good,” he said.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the uninitiated, here are the IT and Cowboy Bebop scenes the characters were referencing. Violence warning for the second clip. General overall warning for creepy clowns.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJWJ6RP55nU  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUyuKicalyw


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNING: Parts of the following chapter contain descriptions of disturbing events. However, the events do not involve any of the main characters directly.

 

The only sounds were short huffs of breath, the rough splashing of footsteps, and an ominous rumble in the distance as they sprinted through tunnels filled with rushing and quickly rising water – now up to Toshirou’s mid-shin and thus thoroughly soaking the bottom of the Yorozuya’s Wednesday yukata.

Even though they were running in the direction of the flow, the current was already so forceful that maintaining balance and speed was difficult – and made significantly more so due to the jumble of bones, armor, old weaponry, and other broken pieces of a forgotten, bloody history that had emerged from their shallow graves in the sudden flood and were now swirling around in the muck. Something sharp sliced deep into Toshirou’s ankle, but it didn’t break his stride. He kept going because they had to reach an exit soon, or they were both going to die. They couldn’t stop for anything.

“Why are you stopping?” he roared, hearing her slide to a halt behind him.

Kagura slapped her wet pant legs with playful hands, watching the muddy water splatter about her and across the tunnel walls. After a moment, she looked up at you – yes, _you_ – directly, and suddenly the distinct sound of a record scratch could be heard.

“I bet you’re wondering how I got into this situation,” she said, gesturing whimsically at this big fucking mess around her.

“China,” Toshirou yelled,” what the hell are you doing? We don’t have time for this!”

She put her hands on her hips and sighed.

“I bet you’re worried, huh?” she asked you, nodding in commiseration. “And wondering how your beloved heroine could be stuck in some dirty swampy tunnels with this guy,” – she threw a thumb in Toshirou’s direction who was busy making his own urgent hand gestures for her to _get goddamn going_ – “in this weirdly life-threatening scenario, when last you heard I was eating some delicious pudding and living the good life.”

“Are you trying to freeze frame?” Toshirou asked. “You know that doesn’t actually work in real life, right? I’m not sure how you got the record scratch to play, and that was admittedly kind of impressive, but time is still passing! The water is still rising!”

China shot a hand into the water that was now up to her waist and brought out a waterlogged, raggedy train conductor’s hat, holding it up for everyone to see.

“I mean,” she said, “how does someone get from pudding to this in just a few hours?”

“You have to know you’re just talking to a wall!” Toshirou said as he waded furiously through the current in her direction. “You do know there isn’t actually anyone there!”

“Well,” China continued, as Toshirou lifted her up bodily by the waist and resumed running, “it’s a long story, but I can tell it if you want to hear it. And I think you do. If you’re still here, you’re either way too bored, or you actually want to know what’s really going on. Even the murky, kinda sad stuff beneath the surface, right?”

Having given up on the kid making the least bit of sense, Toshirou ignored her ramblings as he kept her aloft and continued his forward dash. There had to be an exit around here somewhere. This was far too stupid of a way to die.

China sucked in a breath and said, “It all started when Gin-chan needed to take a sh–"

 

* * *

 

“It is about time I found out what happened to Two Elbow Jabs Man this week,” the Yorozuya announced as he grabbed a Shonen Jump off the table, slid off the couch, and ambled off toward his bathroom near the entryway.

A door opened and shut, and in the silence that followed Toshirou eyed the girl on the couch across from him, meeting a similarly evaluating stare. While he had not made any real progress today in getting the Yorozuya to back down, and had instead only learned vague and unsettling scraps of information about clown incidents, now seemed as good of a time as any to cut his losses and make a strategic retreat for the time being.

He had skipped out on work a little earlier than he should have today to take care of this Gintoki problem, so there was a pile of documents in his room back at the barracks stacking up to the point where it was cosplaying as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. There was really no reason to stay around and talk with this kid.

However, as he made to get up, China asked, “So you wanna be my new mami, huh?”

“Who are you calling your mami?” Toshirou exclaimed in a somewhat deeper voice than usual.

“You’ve got some guts, I’ll give you that,” China said, crossing her arms with a solemn expression. “But it’s a rough application process. Out of all the mamis in the world, I’ve only ever accepted three.”

He knew he shouldn’t ask. He really knew, but that was just too weird.

“Three?”

“Yeah,” China said. “There was my first mami, and she will always be the best one, so don’t even try to replace her.” The girl clenched her fists, but her voice didn’t waver. She barreled right along. “Then I found Mami 2 when I first arrived on Earth. If I went by her shop in the evening right before the sun went down, she would sometimes give me a rice ball if I helped her sweep up the hair, sterilize the branding irons, collect the ball gags, and mop up the blood in the cages.”

“What was this shop? What was in those cages!” Toshirou asked, trying to think of a way that this could not be a terrible thing. Maybe China had been working at one of those new hip ‘fusion’ places. A… barber/butcher fusion? Did fusion places work like that?

Ignoring both his voiced and unvoiced questions, China continued, “One day I went by the shop and found all the doors and windows boarded over and covered in a smelly, black goo. On top of it all, Mami 2 was nowhere to be found. She had disappeared.”

Toshirou tried his damnedest to ignore the implications here.

“I broke down the front door, but the whole place was emptied out. Everything was gone…” China trailed off, a thoughtful look on her face as she seemed to fall back into the memories. “Everything except for one cage. One cage was left and there was one thing left inside it. Can you guess what it was?”

“I really don’t want to,” Toshirou said.

Smiling warmly, China murmured, “There was one last rice ball in there. Mami 2 had left one, because she knew I would come by. It was a little cold and strangely crunchy, but it was a good rice ball, because I knew she had made it for me. Mami 2 was a good mami.”

Toshirou understood. Sometimes a shred of kindness could mean everything to a kid that’s been starved of it, regardless of where it came from. Not that he would ever admit it out loud, but he understood better than most. That didn’t mean he was in the mood to bond over this shit though.

“Are we done?” he asked.

“I haven’t told you about Mami 3,” China said. “She was a scientist.”

A scientist. A clear, non-shady occupation that was a lot less likely to involve branding irons, blood, and black goo. This seemed like it might go in a safer direction. That was good.

“I first saw her when she dropped by Mami 2’s shop just when I had finished up that last rice ball,” China continued.

“You met this one right after you lost the last one?” Toshirou exclaimed.

“She asked me if I had seen any rice ball-shaped objects anywhere around, and when I told her I ate it, she invited me to come along with her for a drive in her limo, so she could show me her cool, super-secret lab.”

Toshirou hadn’t thought there could be much of anything shadier than the story of Mami 2, but he was now absolutely being proved wrong.

“When we got to her lab she gave me another rice ball, which is when I realized I had found Mami 3,” China said.

“Does someone just have to hand you a rice ball to get to mami status? I thought you said your standards were high!”

“It was a good rice ball!” China snapped before admitting: “Although, it did make me throw up a few minutes later.”

“What part of that was in any way good?”

“It helped me learn that Mami 3 was good at cleaning up messes, like a real mami. She took care of things,” China said. “Right after I barfed, she put on this metal apron and then she gathered my barf in a beaker and passed it over to two guys wearing puffy, full body suits who took the beaker down into a weird glowy basement.”

That woman had obviously been after whatever crunchy, radioactive slime China had decided to mistake for a rice ball from Mami 2! Just what kind of plot device had this girl stuffed down her throat?

“What did they do with the beaker?” Toshirou asked, imagining Jurassic Parks and Spidermen and Edo crumbling to the ground at the whims of a motherly mad scientist and her barf beaker.

“I dunno,” China replied. “After I threw up she drove me back into town, and that was the last time I ever saw her.”

“I think it’s in all of our best interests that this one doesn’t make another appearance,” Toshirou said, to which China tut-tutted in response.

“Now now. There’s no reason to get jealous,” she said. “My first three mamis were good mamis, but don’t worry. As long as you give me occasional pearls of wisdom and remind me to stay away from those strange, pushy men, you should do fine, Mami 4.”

“Don’t call me Mami 4,” Toshirou snapped on instinct before the rest of China’s words caught up with him, and he was suddenly glad he had come over in uniform. “Wait, have strange men been trying things with you?”

“Nah, I’m the queen of this town,” she said, grinning. “They know better than that. Although...” China added, “there is this pushy jerk who keeps wanting me to help him spray graffiti of the shogun getting it on with aliens. He keeps asking for my help cause I can jump up to higher places than he can, but I don’t want to! So maybe Sho-chan’s ‘down there’ can get a little smelly, but he’s not a bad guy. Smelly underwear is not a reason to draw mean pictures of him around the city.”

So China had been talking with one of the graffiti assholes! Okay, maybe Toshirou’s paperwork back at HQ could wait a little longer. If this girl could possibly give him some insight as to just where the Banksy-wannabes the Shinsengumi had been trying to track down for the last three chapters were hanging out Toshirou could find the time to stick around. He settled back into his chair and tried not to look too eager. He didn’t want to give her any reason to put a sukonbu price tag on this conversation.

“Sounds like an annoying guy,” Toshirou said, casual as could be. “Take me over to him, so I can talk some sense into him for you.”

“Why would you do that? I don’t need your help anyways,” China snorted dismissively.

And it was true. He wasn’t the person she would ever come to for an extra set of hands. Their relationship was primarily built on one of them standing nearby and adding the occasional color commentary as she punched Sougo in the face or he punched the Yorozuya in the face. Their interactions tended to be more secondhand than direct. Today was the most one-on-one time Toshirou had gotten with China since, well, ever.

And there was a reason that it was happening now, of course. Since he was ostensibly dating her father figure, China wanted him to play house, which seemed like his one way in at this point. He didn’t like it. He really didn’t like it all, but he liked the look Sougo gave him when he came back to the barracks with his uniform spray painted blue and orange after a hapless run-in with one of those graffiti fuckers even less.

“You may not need my help, but I’m here to give it. That’s what mamis do. We take care of things,” he said, while somehow managing not to grit his teeth.

Narrowing her eyes, China replied, “You just told me not to call you mami.”

“I needed some time to warm up to the idea,” Toshirou muttered.

“I see,” China said and then paused, lowering her gaze in way that seemed almost bashful as she fidgeted in her seat. “I guess… I guess I can give you a chance at being my Mami 4, since you seem to want it so much.”

He was not going to feel guilty about this. He was not going to feel guilty about this. _He was not going to feel guilty about this._

Shit, why did China have to take this opportunity to drop the tough act and look like a little girl for once?

“Fine!” Toshirou snapped. “After we give that guy a good talking to, I’ll buy you dinner somewhere.”

A nice meal made up for a little emotional manipulation, right?

China pumped her fist with a cry of, “Wahoo! You’re the best, Mami 4!”, and Toshirou had the sudden, strange feeling that he had actually just made things a whole lot worse.

 

* * *

 

Humming a cheerful tune through her nose, China led Toshirou through the streets of Kabukicho, ignoring the large number of stares and pointed murmurs they seemed to be collecting from passersby.

Mildly irritated by it all, Toshirou couldn’t figure out why the two of them were drawing this much attention. And these weren’t the kind of fearful, nervous glances he had come to expect when he marched a team of his men into rebel territory on a raid. Instead, the looks and whispers were much more… curious and judgmental.

“Um, excuse me,” a woman’s voice said, calling his attention to her presence beside him.

Toshirou recognized her immediately. Pictures of her uniquely scarred face and slender hands that could casually cradle a kiseru as easily as they could throw a kunai at a jugular had been paper clipped to case files the Shinsengumi had rarely been allowed to touch. She was the head of the female enforcement squad down in Yoshiwara, and was looking his way with a carefully neutral expression. The smoke from her kiseru and his cigarette blended together in the air in a way that made it difficult to tell whose was whose.

“Tsukki!” China called out a cheerful greeting, as one would to an old friend, and Toshirou vaguely recalled that this Death God Courtesan and the Yorozuya had been named together in more than few incident reports. And then he started to remember foggy bits and pieces of a terrible night with too much tequila, a Harley Gorillason, and violent women punching him in the head about Dragonball... and then he stopped trying to remember.

“Hello,” the woman said, waving to China and nodding in his direction. “I’m sorry to interrupt your stroll, but I’m what you might call a… fashionista.”

Out of all the words Toshirou had thought might come out of her mouth, fashionista was near the bottom of the list, right next to corsage and play-dough.

“I’m not sure what that has to do with anything,” Toshirou said, because he didn’t.

“I’m a fashion hunter,” the woman continued, as if that clarified the issue.

“How cool!” China enthused. “When did you start doing that?”

“I got my license a few weeks ago, and now when I see interesting fashions I can hunt them down,” she said. “I stake out the shops, seek out the fashionable clothes, and collect them in my… clothing area.”

This woman couldn’t even remember the word people use for a place they put clothes in, and she was calling herself a fashionista! She obviously cared so little about clothes that the words involving them had been kicked out of her brain!

“My clothing area is so full of clothes, I almost can’t fit any more in my.. boudoir!” she exclaimed victoriously, struggling to conceal her genuine grin.

She really shouldn’t sound so happy that she remembered the word! That just made it that more awkward for everyone trying to ignore it! And why did it need to be such an obscure word? Closet would have worked just fine!

“But as a fashionista, I always have to make room for more clothes in my boudoir as well as in my heart. It is part of the lifestyle,” she said. “Which is why I came over to ask you about that yukata you’re wearing. I haven’t seen it on sale in the stores around here. Is it a new brand? Will you tell me where you got it?”

Toshirou looked down at the sleeves of the Yorozuya’s yukata and back up at the leader of the Hyakka, whose knives had, according to rumor, sent torrents of blood raining down the streets of Yoshiwara. What the hell was happening right now?

“It’s Gin-chan’s!” China answered for him. “I thought you would have recognized it. Does it really look that different on someone else?”

Cheeks red, the woman coughed lightly into her fist.

“Yes, well,” she said, “without one sleeve hanging off to the side, it was hard to tell. I don’t think I have ever seen someone wear that yukata properly before. As a fashionista, I must say that it is a refreshing take on an old classic.”

And that was when the realization hit Toshirou like a ton of kunai. This yukata was an old classic. The main character of the goddamn series had been wearing it for hundreds of chapters. Of course people would recognize it even if Toshirou was the one wearing it. There was nothing inconspicuous about this! Goddamn China!

Just before they had left the Yorozuya HQ to track down the graffiti culprit, China had convinced him to change into it, saying that his uniform would make him stand out too much in the part of town they would be going to.

If donning a disguise to make himself a bit less noticeable was going to help him get the guy, Toshirou had been for it, but now that he was thinking about it – about those stares they had been collecting from passersby –, the Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi wearing the Yorozuya’s yukata around the streets of the guy’s home turf was going to cause way more of a ruckus than it was going to prevent. Like this conversation, for example.

“If you want his clothes, you should just ask him,” Toshirou said. “He had a bunch of them just lying around.”

“They’re not just lying around; there’s a strategy to it!” China corrected him. “He makes sure he has one for every day of the week, plus any special occasions like season finales and battle arcs. You’re wearing his Wednesday yukata.”

“His Wednesday yukata? What does it matter what day he wears it? It’s exactly the same as all the rest,” Toshirou snapped.

“You can tell by the way the yukata holds itself, with that terrible stress in the seams from its having to deal with always being worn in the middle of the week,” the woman said, looking him up and down. “Yes, this is definitely the Wednesday yukata, which makes it clear how much trust Gintoki has in you, considering today is Tuesday.”

“I was the one who loaned it to him, actually,” China clarified, “but I bet Gin-chan would have done the same. They’re dating and he’s my new mami!”

Suddenly, there was an animalistic screech off to their left. Toshirou turned to see that ninja stalker collapsed in the middle of the street, clawing aimlessly at the ground. After rolling around and moaning a mixture of non-words and expletives, she staggered to her feet and pointed in his direction.

“No,” she howled. “NO! GIN-SAN IS MINE! HE IS MINE! AND, BY EXTENSION, SO IS HIS YUKATA! GIVE IT BACK!”

Breathing heavily, she ran at Toshirou, reaching out for his clothes only to have someone else snatch her by the elbow and yank her away. The Yoshiwara woman held on tight to the writhing, shrieking ninja, which must have been much harder to do than she made it look, and calmly dragged her down the street.

“TSUKKI! LET GO, TSUKKI! WE CAN’T JUST LET THIS WANTON TROLLOP STEAL GIN-SAN! IT ISN’T RIGHT! LET ME CLAW AT HIM! LET ME GOUGE HIS EYES OUT WITH MY NAILS! LET ME HAMMER NAILS INTO HIS EYES! TSUKKI!!”

“We should be going,” ‘Tsukki’ said over her shoulder to Toshirou and China. “Congratulations and best wishes.”

Toshirou furrowed his brow as he watched the pair disappearing into the crowds until China punched him lightly on the hip.

“Stay strong,” the girl said. “You’re going to have deal with a lot of women being sad that Gin-chan’s off the market.”

Huh. So that was what this had all been about.

That Yoshiwara woman must have already known it was the Yorozuya’s yukata when she approached him. She hadn’t actually wanted to know who he got it from – rather, her interest lay in _why_ he had gotten it. This must have been her way of investigating whether or not this clothes sharing business meant something, and China had certainly given her an answer.

Lighting another cigarette and puffing thoughtfully, Toshirou filed this information away for potential future use. Maybe if a non-stalker, relatively sane woman confessed to the Yorozuya, that would be enough incentive for him to stop being a dumb shit. It could be worth a try. Honestly, at this point, Toshirou was running out of other reasonable options.

He took out his phone to text Yamazaki a quick order to gather up all the intel he could on the Death God Courtesan of Yoshiwara, and let China drag him forward by the sleeve of the Yorozuya’s Wednesday yukata toward what would hopefully lead to a well-deserved arrest.

 

* * *

 

“He hangs out in there,” China announced, gesturing toward a dumpster in an otherwise empty alley.

Toshirou paused, letting his eyes wander across the overflowing pile of trash composed of classic Kabukicho delicacies such as dog shit, old porno mags, ripped up and disgustingly stained couch cushions, and swarms of flies numerous enough to start their own city.

“I’m leaving now,” he said.

“I’m being serious!” China shouted, stomping over to the dumpster. “You promised me dinner after this. I’ll keep my promise, so you better keep yours.”

With a soft grunt, the girl pushed the dumpster aside to reveal a crumbling, corroding iron hatch in the ground. Upon closer inspection, Toshirou could see that it had been covered over with concrete once, sealing up the entryway, but most of that concrete had been chipped away from the handle and sides of the hatch, allowing it to be used once more.

“What is this?” he asked.

In lieu of a verbal response, China simply grabbed the handle and pulled. The hatch opened slowly, inch by inch, shrieking its resistance all the while, until finally revealing a hole with a rope ladder attached to the top, and no bottom in sight. Flashing him a quick grin, China jumped down without even touching the ladder, and he heard the thud of her landing about a second later

“C’mon!” Her voice traveled up to him from the inky blackness below. “What are you waiting for?”

He was waiting for an explanation, actually, but it looked like he was going to have to go and get that for himself.

Toshirou kept one hand on the handle of his sword as he leaped down. It must have been a drop of close to six meters – certainly enough to sting on impact, but nothing he couldn’t handle. Plus, there had been no way he was going to use the ladder when a little girl had already passed up the option.

There was just one thing though. One small, little thing.

Why did it feel like something was gripping his right ankle?

Now, there wasn’t a lot of light down here, so Toshirou really couldn’t see his surroundings all that well – or at all, really – and this included his ankle. He could not actually see his ankle so he couldn’t say for sure that something was actually gripping onto it. There were other possibilities. Maybe he had taken the fall a little too hard and hurt his ankle… Yeah, maybe he cracked the bone or something. And. And then that bone crack had decided that instead of causing outright pain it was instead going to make itself feel like four cold, thin fingers wrapping around his ankle. That must be it. That was how bone cracks worked right?

“Let’s go, Mami 4. If we head down this passage, we’ll get into the main tunnels where there’s light,” China said.

That sounded nice. Light sounded really nice. Then Toshirou would be able to clearly see his bone crack. He could point at it and laugh fondly.

Hearing China’s footsteps growing fainter to his right, Toshirou followed the sound, stepping forward once, twice, then stopping.

“China.”

“What?”

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“When I walked,” Toshirou said, “did you hear a dragging sound?”

“Yeah,” China replied. “Stop scuffing your feet.”

“No,” Toshirou said. “I wasn’t doing that.”

“You obviously were. The sound happened when you moved.”

Toshirou stood very still. Maybe cracks of his bone were falling out of his ankle and being dragged along on the floor as he moved. That was how bone cracks worked right?

“Did you bring a picnic lunch in a big basket for us to eat down here and are dragging it behind you? Is that why you’re making that sound?”

“Where would I have gotten a picnic lunch in the last few seconds?” Toshirou exclaimed.

“I dunno, but mamis are resourceful,” China said.

Toshirou clenched his fists and swallowed. That’s right. He was resourceful. Capable. Strong. He did things. This bone crack that felt like ghostly fingers on his heel and made dragging sounds like ghostly chains in the dirt when he moved was not going to change that.

He started walking and the dragging sound resumed.

He started walking faster and the dragging sound picked up the pace.

He started running and the dragging sound became a clacking sound.

He leaped out of the side passageway and into the light and saw the skeleton attached to his ankle.

“Oh, you brought Larry with you,” China commented from behind him.

“Larry?” Toshirou managed to squeeze a couple syllables out of his lungs in between heart palpitations.

“Yeah, Larry the Skeleton always hung around the entryway to this place. Are you going to put him back when you’re done?”

Toshirou looked down and unceremoniously kicked Larry off of his right ankle with his left foot. He stamped down on the fingers a couple times for good measure.

“Hey! What did Larry ever do to you!” China immediately leaped to the dead man’s defense.

“I don’t like hitchhikers,” Toshirou replied stonily, finally getting his heart rate under control.

China gave him a dark look and spat on the floor. “Said like a true cop.”

Oi, the Yorozuya really needed to teach his snotty brat some manners! Or, maybe, that was precisely the problem. He needed to stop teaching her _his_ manners.

“But I suppose Larry might be happier here,” China added after a moment, “cause now he can make some more friends.”

Friends? Toshirou looked around.

The tunnel was faintly illuminated by a string of dusty, incandescent bulbs hanging from a ceiling which was low enough in spots that he was going to have to be careful about hitting his head. In the stretches where the bulbs were still giving off some light, he could make out some details of the sides and floor of the tunnel, which were covered in a mixture of dirt and crumbled stone. A line of rusted and broken iron tracks ran through the middle of the floor, suited for nothing larger than a small mining cart, although Toshirou did not see one nearby.

What he did see was those friends China had casually mentioned. Sticking out of the floor and walls there were a shocking amount of femurs, tibias, ribs, spines, and skulls. Just with a quick glance he could already tell they were standing in a tunnel filled with the broken scattered bones of a metric fuckton of dead people.

That was when Toshirou realized precisely _where_ they were. The hatch with the concrete, the tunnels, the dead...

Swallowing a mixture of cold, sharp feelings, he lit himself a cigarette and eyed the girl next to him.

“How did you find this place?” he asked her.

“One of my friends discovered that opening under the dumpster and then bet me a rice ball I wouldn’t jump down and see what it was.”

A rice ball! Again! How desperately hungry was this girl?

“I explored the tunnels a bit, and realized this was a great place for a secret base,” she continued, idly sticking her tongue out at a skull with half a jaw half-submerged in the wall near her eye level. “It could be my Fortress of Solitude.”

“This isn’t the sort of dump you should be hanging around in,” Toshirou said, because someone had to, and it seemed like no one had done so yet. “Does the Yorozuya know you go down here?”

“I don’t ask Gin-chan where he slinks off to with unimpressive wads of cash in the middle of the day, and he doesn’t ask me where I go with my friends. We have an understanding,” she said.

What understanding? Obviously the Yorozuya was going to pachinko his meager savings away or do some pathetic day drinking or go on a pointless sugar binge in that scenario. That would be easy enough for anyone who knew him for at least a few minutes to understand. But who was going to guess that this kid was hanging out with skeletons underneath a dumpster? Who was going to understand that?

Seeing his dubious expression for what it was, China frowned. “You’re not going to tell him either. This is a mami-daughter thing. Got it?”

The girl cracked her knuckles ominously, and Toshirou began to wonder if she might actually know a bit more about these tunnels than she was letting on.

It wasn’t a well known story, because the government had spent a big amount of money and manpower to make it that way, but enough people still knew – particularly among the rebels. According to a few key Shinsengumi informants, this was a story often told to new recruits in the more radical Joui factions to convince them that there was no place left for diplomacy and more peaceful approaches to change.

They say it happened right near the end of the war, after the Shogunate had officially surrendered to the Amanto, but well before most of their warriors and citizens were ready to stand down. There was a strong militia movement near the outskirts of Edo at that time – with those involved donating what muscle and supplies they could to the front lines.

The group dug a series of tunnels, creating a way to transport goods and men to key locations without alerting their enemies to their movements. Whenever the signal came, fighters lugging weapons, bandages, food, and drink would drop down the nearest entryway into the tunnels, and a whole swarm of them would reemerge at the tunnel exit closest to the battlefield where they were needed.

Their support wasn’t enough to change the tides of a failing war, but it was something. It was something to those last remaining samurai, and it was something to the aliens that fought them as well.

It turned out that the secret tunnels were not so secret to their enemies after all.

At a moment of peak activity, when hundreds, maybe over a thousand men were traveling underground, something was set loose in those tunnels. Something deadly. As to what exactly that something was, nobody living now seems to know.

The only thing various storytellers can agree on is that _something_ happened in the tunnels and, as it did, boulders guarded by groups of heavily armed Amanto were placed atop each and every hatch – every entryway back to the surface. They say the pounding of fists and urgent screams lasted for over an hour until all went silent.

The following day, trucks filled with bakufu officials came by to remove the boulders and pour layers of concrete over the hatches in a way that made the mass graves look like nothing more than newly paved side streets. Hand in hand, the sitting government and the Amanto had mercilessly gutted some of the last large-scale grassroots resistance left to play a part in the war.

This was a story that had taken on the spice of a myth, an urban legend, because while there were still people alive that could remember some of the details of when and how it happened, no one seemed able or willing to point their finger in the direction of where.

Now smack dab in the middle of the tunnels and surrounded by the very bones themselves, Toshirou realized that the tales had not been exaggerated. If anything, they had been understated. A lot of people had died gruesome deaths on that day, and considering the Yorozuya’s role in the war, he had probably known a few of these bones. Or known people who had known them.

If China knew even a small part of the story of these tunnels, then it would make sense that she wouldn’t want Gintoki to know about this place. It could only hold bloodthirsty ghosts and oily black memories for a guy like him. If she knew, the girl was being protective.

“If you don’t want him finding out, why come back here?” Toshirou asked.

“He’s not going to find out,” China said matter-of-factly and then hit him with a hard side eye, “because no one’s going to tell him. Besides,” she added, “if he wants a cool secret tunnel with dead people in it, he’s going to have to find his own. I have dibs on this one,” she proclaimed in a way that had Toshirou wondering if he had been overthinking her motivations.

“You don’t need a tunnel with dead people,” he said.

“But I’m a growing girl!” China exclaimed.

Toshirou was at a loss with how to respond to that kind of logic, and was fortunate enough to find an excuse to simply ignore it in the trilling of his cell phone.

“This is Hijikata,” he said, answering the call.

“I want to report a crime.”

Actually, his conversation with China would be better than this.

“Yorozuya,” Toshirou said. “Don’t make me regret giving you my number.”

“You’re a cop, so I’m reporting a crime,” the Yorozuya’s voice insisted. “A theft. A grand theft. A grand theft yukata.”

Toshirou looked down at the Yorozuya’s Wednesday yukata and found himself seriously tempted to throw it on top of Larry the Skeleton, stomp roughly on the both of them, and wander the death tunnels in just his underwear.

“I’ll bring it back later,” he said finally.

“That’s unacceptable. It’s my Wednesday yukata and today’s Tuesday. We’re not at the level in our relationship where I can trust you with that kind of responsibility,” the Yorozuya said.

“Why is it so important that you wear this one tomorrow? They all look the same!” Toshirou snapped. Was everyone out of their goddamn minds?

“Just because you’re an uncultured heathen who doesn’t understand the intricacies of my expert fashion doesn’t mean the rest of the world is,” the Yorozuya said. “The audience can tell! Ratings will drop! They will cancel us!”

“If they didn’t decide to scrap this train wreck while you were sitting on the crapper for most of this chapter, I really doubt that wearing one of the other yukatas tomorrow is going to be the breaking point for people,” Toshirou deadpanned.

“Hey! Don’t underestimate the power of toilet scenes, asshole!” the Yorozuya growled. “I spent most of my time shitting during the Yagyuu arc, and to this day many consider it to be some of my best work.”

“I think that says less about the power of toilet scenes and more about how low everyone’s expectations are of you.”

“Fine. I get it. You don’t understand art,” the Yorozuya said dismissively. “But that’s not what I called about. When I came out of the bathroom of my own home after an amount of time that was normal for a healthy shit, I looked around to discover my priceless Wednesday yukata was gone. And also Kagura, so I guess that’s kidnapping too. Theft and kidnapping. Do something about it. I’m dating a cop, so I expect perks.”

“You don’t get perks,” Toshirou said, because that was an idea that needed to be nipped right in the bud.

“I’m not asking for much,” the Yorozuya continued, undaunted. “Just bring back my stuff then arrest yourself for miscarrying justice – and my yukata.”

Toshirou heaved a breath, took the phone away from his ear, and held his finger over the ‘End Call’ button, which prompted China to ask, “Are you done whispering sweet nothings at each other?”

Forcibly ignoring the question with every fiber of his being, he thrust the phone in her direction and said, “You talk to him.”

Shrugging, China took the phone easily enough.

“Are you done whispering sweet nothings at each other?” she repeated the question to the Yorozuya in place of any standard greeting.

Whatever his response was, China found it boring.

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, picking her nose. “You’ll get your Wednesday yukata back before Wednesday. Now stop interrupting our mami-daughter day.”

With that, she promptly ended the call and tossed him back his phone, which Toshirou caught with a sigh. If he was lucky, maybe the phrase ‘mami-daughter day’ would freak the Yorozuya out enough to get him to back off. Somehow, though, he didn’t feel all that lucky.

“Hurry it up. I’m getting hungry,” China said.

 

* * *

 

As they made their way through the tunnels, Toshirou couldn’t help but take note of the placement of the dead bodies. The two of them would walk for a kilometer or so, without encountering more than a couple dozen skeletons to speak of, and then they would stumble over a mass of them – a hundred or more – in a small stretch of tunnel that couldn’t have been more than 10 meters long. He and China had entered the tunnels at one of those spots where the skeletons amassed, but, contrary to first impressions, most of this place was just plain empty… and falling apart.

At certain points the tunnels had collapsed enough that they had to crawl their way through. As the larger of the two, Toshirou had even had to do a little bit of digging in order to fit into some of the tightest crawlspaces, occasionally brushing cheek to cheekbone with nearby entombed skeletons.

Whatever had been let loose in here had not only destroyed people, but also a good amount of the structure around it. Admittedly, after all this up-close observation, Toshirou had his theories as to what it had been, but who was he going to tell? A government that had been – at the very least – complicit in all this? Larry the Skeleton? The stupid girl who shouldn’t even be down here in the first place?

Considering how naturally China led him through this maze of tunnels, hardly hesitating at any intersection, she came down here often – too often. She should try and do better things with her time.

“You don’t need this tunnel filled with dead people. You can find a better secret lair,” Toshirou said, finally continuing their conversation from earlier.

“I know,” China agreed, leading them down the left path as the tunnel diverged. “But it wouldn’t be as fun. I think broken messy stuff can be interesting – lucky for you, Mami 4.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he snapped.

 

* * *

 

After a full hour of walking, crawling, and China roping him into a game of I Spy where her answer always ended up being mounds of dirt of varying sizes, they found their guy sleeping on top of a pair of nondescript wooden crates. China kicked him awake mid-snore.

As the idiot yelped and blinked to consciousness, Toshirou could already tell by his body type that this guy was different from the two punks in scream masks he had encountered for graffiti-related reasons over the past few weeks. This one was short enough that any chase scene wouldn’t have gone as well for him as it had for the scream duo.

“I see why he wants your help getting higher up,” Toshirou commented, which elicited an indignant ‘Hey!’ from the short-stack.

“Yeah, I guess I could get to spots he couldn’t, but I don’t see why graffiti has to be high up in the first place,” China said. “There are other short people and babies that might still notice it down low.”

“Kagura-chan,” the guy said her name like a parent catching their child after curfew. He frowned as he got to his feet. “I told you not to tell people about our talks.”

“Why would I listen to you? You never gave me any rice balls like you promised you would!”

“You shouldn’t be listening to this guy even if he gives you rice balls,” Toshirou said sharply, which got him another ‘Hey!’ from pint size.

“You don’t know me, jerk,” the guy said, straightening up and puffing out his chest in a way that made him appear just slightly larger than China.

Toshirou got out a notepad and flipped it open, pen poised at the ready.

“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know you,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me your name, address, and associates, so we can fix that?”

“I’m not telling you anything!” the guy shouted at the same time China said, “I know those first two.”

“His name’s Osamu and he lives here,” she told Toshirou, before grinning reassuringly at Osamu. “Don’t worry. This is just my new mami. He’s here to help.”

Osamu took a kerchief out of his jacket pocket and dabbed his forehead.

“Oh,” he said. “This is just a family visit? My goodness.” Osamu sat down on one of his crates and chuckled, rocking back and forth. “You frightened me, Kagura-chan! Your mami looks so much like the Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi that I thought it was all over for a moment!”

“Well,” China said, scuffing her feet. “He is that too, I guess.”

Osamu fell off his crate a second time.

Toshirou might have fallen off his own crate too if he had one. What was the point in wearing this shitty yukata if China was just going to blurt out his real identity! Sighing, he got out a pair of cuffs and prepared for a chase.

“Whatever you’re plotting down here is done,” Toshirou said, walking forward.

“You’re right, I am done,” Osamu agreed, “but so are you if you take another step.”

The man took out a small device from his pocket.

“There’s enough C-4 in those crates to blow us all to pieces, so I doubt you want me using this detonator,” he said, which had Toshirou quickly backing up and standing in front of China. Shit.

The guy could be lying, but Toshirou couldn’t take that chance. Not with this little girl here.

“What are you doing, Osa-chan!” China said, clearly shocked. “You’re not cool enough to pull this sort of badass evil move.”

“You’re a good girl, Kagura-chan,” Osamu murmured wistfully, the insult clearly going over his head, which was an easy accomplishment due to his head being so close to the ground. “I wish I didn’t have to involve you in this, but you brought the Shinsengumi to my door. I don’t have a choice.”

“Yes, you do,” China replied. “And you’re making a stupid one! Dumbass!”

She was right on the money. This was why you weren’t supposed to set up camp in the bones of your past. This guy had done so – he’d been living in this graveyard for who the hell knows how long – and now he was willing to kill a kid over it all.

“So maybe your father or uncle died in these tunnels way back when,” Toshirou said. “It’s over with. It’s done. Don’t let it make you do something you’ll regret.”

Shaking his head, Osamu said, “No, no, Vice-Commander. You’ve got it all wrong. My family wasn’t killed in these tunnels; it was my family that did the killing.”

"What the hell do you mean?" Toshirou demanded.

His hand hovered over his sword as Osamu began to back away slowly with a fist tightly clenched around the detonator.

“My father was the top hydraulics engineer working for the government during the war. To put it simply, he made sure water got to the right places in the right amounts across the city,” Osamu answered as he moved. “Then, one day, he got a message from his boss. It said that two critical water mains would be ruptured that afternoon, and that his team should ignore it. They were ordered to quiet any system alerts, cancel any automated protective measures, and go about business as usual. They were ordered to let the water keep flowing. And that is what they did.

“From those targeted ruptures, water flooded these tunnels around us,” Osamu said, gesturing about, “while my father looked the other way. He did what he was told when one press of a button on his end could have stopped the flow. Admittedly, he did not know at the time that the flood was used to drown hundreds of men, so he was made a mass-murderer in ignorance by following orders. But ignorance was no excuse. He knew that. He found out the truth the next day, confessed to his family, and left the house in the middle of the night. That was the last day anyone ever saw him.

He took a deep breath and said, “I took the opportunity of his absence to become my father.”

To which China exclaimed: “You killed him and assumed his identity!”

“No!” Osamu yelped. “I didn’t… No!”

“That’s exactly what a murderer would say!” China pursued, pointing her finger at him in extreme prejudice.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, and stop moving! I’ll blow this place up if you don’t stop moving!”

China stuck out her lip and glared at him.

“I didn’t kill him,” he said firmly. “I studied hard and got his job by proving my skill. I got to a place where I could exact my revenge on the very system that took my father from me. I was the top hydraulics engineer working for the government for the last three years until I quit last month – but not before I completed some fundamental installations that will prevent anyone monitoring the water system from seeing if a rupture has occurred in the water main located one meter deep into the wall to your right.”

Toshirou looked over to see the crates of C-4 nestled right next to the area of the tunnel Osamu was pointing toward. A blast in this case would not only cause an explosion, but also another flood.

This was… bad.

“With my crates of C4, I can recreate the catastrophe that killed so many men. Admittedly, I would have preferred to bring a larger group of government officials down into these tunnels for that experience. I wanted to drown the very people who control the government apparatus, but I know you will not let me do that, Vice-Commander, so I will have to settle for just burying you.”

Even with his short little legs, Osamu had backed away to the point where he was standing on the opposite side of the crates from Toshirou and China, at a good distance away.

“Wait!” Toshirou shouted and lunged forward, but China wrapped her arms around his waist and held him back.

“Don’t!” she cried, and Toshirou wasn’t sure if she was talking to him or the man with the bomb.

“I truly am sorry, Kagura-chan,” Osamu said and pressed the button.

 

* * *

 

“So now you’re all caught up. What a wild ride, huh?” Kagura asked you.

“You’ve been staring at the wall in complete silence for the last two minutes and that’s all you have to say?” Toshirou exclaimed, still carrying her above his head as he staggered his way forward through the rising flood.

“It seemed like a good time to get everyone on the same page,” she said, and wriggled out of Toshirou’s grip.

Diving into the water, she emerged floating belly-up and chewing a stick of sukonbu, while letting the current carry her along, easily keeping up with Toshirou’s pace courtesy of a mild backstroke.

“The water’s a little cold, but this is still kinda nice,” she mused cheerfully.

Toshirou chose to ignore her and look forward. The tunnel stretched out ahead of them, seemingly endless, with no escape hatches in sight.

“Where’s the nearest exit to here that you’ve found?” he asked.

“The one we came in,” she replied.

That couldn’t be right. That was way too far away. There was no way they could make it all the way back there in time. The water was rising far too quickly.

“China,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“If you really can freeze frame, now would be a great time to do it.”

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

It wasn’t until the flood was rushing its way high enough to cover Toshirou’s shoulders that China finally asked, “So when is the water going to stop?”

He glanced at her as he continued his desperate forward slog and she floated along beside him. Due to the height of the floodwaters, they were almost at eye level with one another, which was a strange perspective made stranger, because they really weren’t seeing eye to eye in the figurative sense right now.

“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.

“Well, the water has to stop coming soon, or else it’s going to fill the whole tunnel!” China exclaimed, looking at him like he was the idiot here.

“The water’s not stopping,” he said. “That’s your stupid buddy’s whole plan. Weren’t you listening?”

“I was zoning in and out,” China admitted easily enough and then slapped her arms backward into the filth, spraying tunnel water all over the place. “It’s not my fault he’s so boring! When he gets going talking about those engines and systems and stuff, he won’t stop unless you punch him hard enough, and I couldn’t get over to punch him this time, so I was busy thinking about whether or not I should throw a rock at him instead.”

Toshirou snorted. “You should have thrown the rock.”

China shot him a wicked grin in response before her expression turned more thoughtful.

“So you’re saying the water’s just going to keep coming?” she asked. “It’s not like when you accidentally poke a hole in the inflatable pool and water comes rushing out for a while but then it stops, even though Mo-chan’s mom is still yelling at you to stop bringing spears to her daughter’s birthday party every year?”

“The water’s not stopping,” he said again, which finally, at long last, seemed to get the point across.

China thrashed about in a panic.

“We need to get out of here!” she yelped. “I’m too beautiful to die!”

“Chi-” Toshirou started, but was quickly interrupted when one of China’s wayward fists windmilled right into his nose, sending him flying backward and downward.

He barely had time to close his mouth before he was submerged, falling head over heels into the murky waters. Even though the flood only came up to his neck when he was standing at full height, the water was teeming with enough dirt to make it so he couldn’t rely on light to tell him which way was up. The rushing current and piles of debris bashed him this way and that, finally throwing him into the outstretched grasp of a group of skeletons buried in the tunnel floor – or was it the wall?

Either way, swimming away from them seemed to be the right choice. He pushed his feet against the wall – or was it the floor? –, but something held his arm fast in place. He looked down to see a rusted rapier stabbed straight through the sleeve of the Yorozuya’s Wednesday yukata mere millimeters from Toshirou’s bicep. Without a moment’s hesitation, he ripped the sleeve off and tried swimming away again, zipping through the muck toward… another pile of skeletons this time on the floor – or was it the wall?

This had to be one of those spots in the tunnels that had a big bunch of the dead all grouped together. Just his luck.

Toshirou pushed off once again, striking out for some kind of surface as he tumbled through the current, only to arrive at his third pile of underwater bones. However, this time, he paused and stared.

Maybe it was the lack of oxygen, or maybe it was just that desiccated corpses brought out this side of him – whatever it was, he couldn’t help but notice that one of the skeletons was posed in the way Mitsuba had liked to sit when she had had the opportunity to watch Sougo at practice at Kondo’s dojo in Bushu. It really did look strikingly similar to what he remembered.

As she initially settled, her legs would be firmly underneath her, but, as the day went on, he would start to see her feet in tabi peeking out from beneath her thighs to her left. But however the rest of her body might shift, her head always remained high and still, unmoving as she gazed intently at Sougo’s training with such pride and warmth.

If she was there when they started, she would still be there by the time they finished, standing up as Sougo ran toward her to tell her exaggerated stories about what marvelous feats of swordsmanship he had accomplished that day even though she had been there to witness them herself. Regardless, Mitsuba would appear impressed at his stories every time, as she led him hand-in-hand to the exit.

Some days she would turn back and smile at Toshirou, who would always pretend he hadn’t just been watching everything out of the corner of his eye, and busy himself gathering up scattered bokken or pretending like he was rubbing a stain out of the floor or something else equally stupid. Some days he was struck with the overwhelming urge to walk them home, but he could never figure out how to ask.

The words never came.

Unbidden, his hand reached out to touch the submerged skull only to find it cold, because of course it was. She was gone.

But, Toshirou suddenly realized, that didn’t have to mean she couldn’t still show him the way out.

Something hit his head roughly, and he looked up to see a familiar umbrella raking through the muck. He grabbed the end of it with a sharp tug, and suddenly he was being lifted up and out of the current by an overwhelming strength. He breached the surface with a gasp, sucking in a much-needed lungful of oxygen, and when his vision cleared he found a pale-faced China holding the other end of the umbrella in one hand, while gripping the wall of the tunnel with the other to anchor her in the flood. Now there was only her head-length between the rising water and the ceiling.

“You weren’t coming back up!” China accused. “Don’t you dare leave me alone in here!”

She looked upset, but, alongside that, impressively steady and firm. All traces of her initial panic had dissipated, having been replaced with the intense focus of a warrior and protector at battle with crisis. She was a kid, but, more importantly, she was Gintoki’s kid. She would fight for the two of them until there wasn’t a single breath left in her body – and maybe even a little after that.

But Toshirou was here to make sure that would never happen.

“There is an exit tunnel right around here,” he said. “There has to be.”

“What?” China blinked. “Did water worms get into your brain? We’re nowhere close to where we came in!”

“It’s definitely here,” Toshirou insisted. “But we’re going to have to dig for it. The entryway must have been sealed off by a cave-in during the last flood.”

Giving him a searching look, she asked, “You’re sure?”

He nodded. There had to be a reason all these people had congregated right here before their death when the floodwaters came that first time. This must have been a place where they thought escape would have been possible – if Amanto and concrete hadn’t stood in their way. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it sooner – that it had taken a ghost of a memory to get him on the right track –, but now he was certain that these areas of the tunnels stacked with the dead must have been near designated exit routes.

“Okay,” China said, nodding her trust. “It’s your turn to hold on tight to the umbrella.”

She dove underwater with a sharp kick, bringing her side of the umbrella down with her, as Toshirou stuffed his fingers into a large crack in the tunnel wall and choked the handle of the umbrella to keep them both from being dragged away. A flurry of dirt and stone shot out of the water, as the Yato girl wreaked havoc on the surrounding debris. Seconds later she emerged with a victorious cry.

“I found it!”

And she had. A short side tunnel and ladder climb later, China punched a sealed hatch hard enough to send it and the slab of crumbling concrete encasing it soaring up into the air, and then there was sunlight.

 

* * *

 

“I don’t appreciate blood or mud on my floor,” the woman announced, giving them both a sharp eye as she cleaned off an extremely sharp knife.

After Toshirou and China had crawled out of the hole next to a wholly different – but no less disgusting – dumpster from the one they had encountered earlier that day, they had found themselves in the alleyway right beside the ramen shop Hokuto Shinken. China’s stomach had growled loud enough to start a reasonably-sized earthquake and she had marched right in.

“It’s okay,” China assured the woman as she approached the counter and took a seat. “Just put our mess on Gin-chan’s tab. I know he comes here sometimes.”

“Blood’s not something you can just put on a tab.”

“It’s okay,” China said again. “He’s good for it.”

“Good for what? A thorough mopping?”

As the two were arguing, Toshirou passed them by and picked up the phone behind the counter.

“Hey!” Oh, so the woman was angry at him now. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Not even pausing as he punched in the numbers, Toshirou replied, “I’m using your phone. Police business.”

His cellphone broke in the flood, and he needed to let the right people know about a particular leak in a particular water main sooner rather than later. Also, Osamu the Fuckwad was getting a goddamn APB on his ass.

“Just give the girl what she wants to eat and I’ll pay for it,” he continued. His wallet had fared a little better than his phone. The bills were waterlogged, but still good.

China’s eyes gleamed bright at his words. She leaned on the counter with her elbows and declared, “Give me one of everything.”

 

* * *

 

Toshirou had finished his calls by the time China had licked clean her sixth bowl. After a moment of consideration, she poured the contents of seven on top of eight, and resumed her Earth-scorching assault on all things edible. Toshirou slipped enough money out of his wallet to pay for their mess and China’s appetite – enough money to make him think twice about buying the ‘Two Dozen Delight!Mayo Value Pack’ until his next paycheck –, before making his way to the exit.

“Where are you going?” China spat out a mouthful of ramen at him.

“There’s a lot happening. I’m heading back to the barracks,” he said, wiping a few noodles off his forehead and noticing that they came off bloody. While he was technically still in the middle of his half-day off, far too many plot lines had emerged for him to just be sitting around leaking fluids.

“Not yet,” China argued, patting the stool next to her aggressively. “You promised me dinner – a meal after everything.”

“And you’re getting one. I don’t need to be around to see you inhale it.”

“Yes you do,” she insisted. “That’s what a meal is. A meal is people eating together. Eating by yourself is just food, not a meal. It’s not the same.”

“You’re not by yourself. There’s...” he trailed off, waving in the general direction of the woman who was now in the middle of washing China’s soaring pile of dirty dishes.

“Ikumatsu,” the woman supplied.

“There’s Ikumatsu,” Toshirou said.

China turned back to her food, head lowered as she picked up her chopsticks with somewhat less enthusiasm than before.

“You _promised_ , Mami 4,” she said again into the silence. “But if you have to go, it’s okay. I’ll forgive you.”

The thing about it was that Toshirou knew what she was doing. He could see a manipulation tactic like this from a mile off. He knew it because he wasn’t stupid, and also because the Yorozuya pulled this kind of shit enough for it to be an easy lesson for her to learn. Toshirou was on the receiving end of it all the damn time.

To name one example, if he was about to leave a bar before the Yorozuya was done draining money out of him, the guy would argue. He’d sneer and call Toshirou a lightweight, demanding that he stay. And then, when the Yorozuya’s cajoling didn’t work, he would finally resort to the fucking guilt tripping.

Last time, which must have been a month or so ago, the guy had said something like, “Hey, just a little longer all right? That way I think I can stop myself from remembering that time you wrecked my scooter last month.”

Which was patently untrue. What had actually happened was Toshirou had driven a patrol car by the Yorozuya sitting forlornly on the sidewalk, an extra horrible frizz to his perm, right next to a smoking pile of metal. They had locked eyes for a short moment before Toshirou had hit the gas and left the pathetic scene far behind him.

Regardless, at the bar the Yorozuya had insisted, “My scooter must have known you were going to be coming by and tried to explode itself to avoid seeing your depressing face. You owe me a tearfully pathetic apology, because it really was all your fault.”

No, he didn’t, because it wasn’t, but Toshirou had found himself sitting back down to argue his point and they ended up drinking for a couple more hours. He didn’t actually come to the realization that he had played right into the asshole’s hands until he was struggling through a terrible hangover during the Shinsengumi morning briefing the following day. Rinse and repeat.

It had happened a frustrating number of times over the past year, to Sougo’s joy. The kid would always somehow seem to know in advance which mornings would have Toshirou’s brain ready to drip out of his ears, and inevitably prepared extremely complex questions about strategy and politics that required Toshirou to actually think in ways that made him want to die, or kill someone. Maybe Yamazaki if he was nearby.

His point being that the Yorozuya was so many pains in all of his sides.

And the guy was smart enough to only try this kind of shit when there was alcohol involved, because Toshirou wouldn’t ever fall for that sort of stupidity when he was in his right mind. Definitely not. He was sure of it. The only reason he was hesitating now was because China was a lot better at guilt tripping than the Yorozuya, which maybe had a little to do with her being a kid and Sakata Gintoki being a grown-ass man.

Yeah, for some reason, China looked surprisingly small sitting at that counter all be herself.

Dammit. Fine. Maybe he could stay just a little longer.

Toshirou walked back to the phone and dialed up Yamazaki.

“Call me at this number if something comes up,” he ordered before taking a seat next to China and grabbing his own bowl out of the pile. “I could use a little fuel before heading out,” he muttered to no one in particular.

China grinned at him, savoring her victory. However, the smile quickly vanished as she watched Toshirou empty an entire bottle of mayonnaise on top of his dish. It jiggled and shone bright under the overhead lights as he slid the bowl closer to himself and readied his chopsticks. Now that he let himself feel it, he actually was pretty damn hungry.

“Actually, I changed my mind. You can go,” China said.

 

* * *

 

As the last rays of sun were disappearing below the horizon, with neon signs and streetlights flickering alive to take their place, Toshirou walked China home. Today, home apparently meant the Shimura dojo.

When Toshirou had questioned this announcement, she had shrugged and replied, “I’m tired of men. I need a break. You know how it is, don’t you, Mami 4?”

“Despite what you call me, you do realize I am also a man, right?”

China ignored him, crossing her arms lazily behind her head, as she gazed up at the first few stars of twilight. Unwilling to summon the energy to fight her on this one, Toshirou took out a cigarette, noting that it still felt damp, but was dry enough for a light. Wet cigs were the worst, but he wasn’t going to let Osamu ruin his day any more than the twerp already had. He would have his smoke and he would goddamn enjoy it.

They walked the rest of the way in silence, until the gates of the Shimura dojo were right in front of them. Here, China paused.

She still wasn’t looking at him as she said, “I’m sorry about today.”

“Huh?” Toshirou hadn’t been expecting that.

“I knew Osa-chan was having problems. It was getting to the point that I was worried he might do something really bad, which is why I showed you where he was, but I didn’t think he would do his bad thing when I was around. I didn’t think killing you would be more important to him than not killing me,” she muttered, swallowing, before adding in a voice even quieter than before, “We were friends.”

Toshirou’s chest felt tight. This really was one horrible cigarette.

“No,” he said. “You were his friend; he didn’t return the favor.”

With what appeared to take a gargantuan effort, China ripped her gaze from the sky and turned to him. Her eyes were shining.

“I know that. And I know that today wasn’t the best day, but there can be better ones. He may not be my friend, but I want to be yours. Okay, Toshi?” China spoke firmly, insistently, in a way that drove forward her sincerity with dagger sharpness.

Toshirou’s cigarette fell out of his mouth, burning faintly in the dirt.

“What?”

“Gin-chan doesn’t date people,” she said, seemingly out of the blue. “But now he’s dating you. That means you’re important.”

And suddenly, it all made sense. China wanted to play house with him because she thought this was significant. She wanted to go on a mami-daughter day with him because she didn’t realize that this rare example of the Yorozuya actually ‘dating’ someone was just the idiot inventing a pissing contest that had never existed in the first place. She thought this meant her boss was doing something different – in a way that could change things for him and for her – when in reality all this was just more of the same stupid behavior.

Goddammit Yorozuya. Think about the consequences before you gay chicken!

“You don’t need to worry about this thing between me and him. It’s not a big deal,” Toshirou said with emphasis.

“If you’re important to him then I want us to get along too,” she declared, fundamentally missing the point.

_Goddammit Yorozuya._

Toshirou felt like he was in quicksand – itchy permy quicksand that kept flicking boogers and problems at him.

“That’s not –”

“I’m not saying it has to happen right away,” she interrupted and stretched up to pat him on the shoulder. “Just… let’s hang out and have rice balls sometime!”

With one last grin, she ran over to the Shimura siblings, who were in the middle of opening their gate to most likely figure out what all this ruckus was about.

“Kagura-chan and… Hijikata-san!” glasses exclaimed, looking at the pair of them like they weren’t quite the combination he expected.

“I’m sleeping here tonight,” China announced imperiously, dragging glasses back toward the main building. “Shinpachi! Prepare my futon!”

“Okay okay! Don’t be so rough,” he scolded, but didn’t seem to be digging in his heels all too hard as the two quickly disappeared indoors.

This left Toshirou alone with the older Shimura at the entrance gate.

“My, it looks like you’ve had quite the day,” she commented, bringing a hand to her cheek.

“I’ve had worse,” Toshirou replied.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Shimura said. “I was talking to Gin-san’s Wednesday yukata.”

So this thing was sentient now!

Smiling, Shimura added, “And Hijikata-san, thank you for bringing by Kagura-chan.”

He nodded slightly. After demanding that he stay for dinner with her, China had demanded he walk her home, and now he had realized just what was making her so clingy. Maybe Shimura could help with that where he couldn’t.

“Try and tell her that she doesn’t have to take this thing between me and the Yorozuya so seriously,” he said.

“Shouldn’t she?”

“No!”

What the hell was wrong with everyone? Wasn’t there someone, _anyone_ in this fucking world that could see what the Yorozuya was actually doing? Didn’t any of them know him well enough to see this situation for what it actually was: a sham?

A sham designed purely to piss Toshirou off.

“It looks pretty serious to me,” Shimura replied far too calmly for his liking.

“In what way?” he challenged desperately.

Shimura eyed him curiously, studying his demeanor, which quickly prompted him to get his panicked, twitching facial muscles under control. Toshirou stuck another cigarette in his mouth and fiercely pretended like his blood pressure wasn’t spiking through the roof right now.

Seeming to choose her words carefully, Shimura said, “At first, I thought you had lied to the gorilla.”

“What?”

“You told him you had fallen for someone, but then you immediately agreed to my matchmaking scheme,” she clarified. “You seemed ready to marry the first person that would keep up appearances enough to make your commander happy, even though no one was forcing you to. As far as I could tell, there wasn’t any political pressure, bribery, or other kind of necessity behind your decision, and I didn’t think anyone could be that casually self-sacrificing if they actually had someone else that they cared for.”

Shimura was far too sharp. While her analysis wasn’t perfect, it was good enough to make Toshirou feel uncomfortably exposed.

“You were testing me,” he said.

“I would call it more of a pop quiz, but yes,” she admitted. “And I thought I understood your answer until Gin-san sat down at the booth and joined the competition.”

Toshirou thought back to that day, recalling that the Yorozuya had blabbed some stupid stuff to Shimura about him confessing his love. While technically true, the words had just served to create misunderstanding after shitty misunderstanding, as evidenced by the way Shimura was treating him now – like he was the protagonist of a stupid, boring movie that had lots of closeup shots of people standing emotionally in the rain without umbrellas. Pedoro would never do something like that and neither would he.

It just wasn’t him. He wasn’t dashing toward some flowery, shiny happily ever after. He wasn’t courting the Yorozuya to the courthouse. Nothing was supposed to have come from his words that night at the bar.

In a stupid burst of drunken instinct, he’d told another drunk what was on his mind. It had been a nice release in the moment, but the consequences that had followed were the worst.

The Yorozuya refused to think Toshirou’s motives were as simple as they had actually been, refused to gather up the smallest scrap of human decency required to wave away Toshirou’s feelings like a man, and was instead all in on proving his own shitty conspiracy theories, while people like Shimura and China were far too willing to accept the surface reading and see a legitimate relationship where there would never be one.

WHY COULDN’T ANYONE UNDERSTAND?

“I told you before,” Toshirou said brusquely, “the stuff the Yorozuya said about me confessing to him wasn’t what he was making it out to be. It’s not important”

Because it shouldn’t matter to anyone else what Toshirou felt about anyone. His train stations were his own business, and he wouldn’t let them get in the way of the things he needed to do. That was the whole point.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Shimura replied, shaking her head. “It was before Gin-san started mouthing off about anything like that. When he first sat down to eat with you. It wasn’t what either of you said, it was the way you both…” she trailed off, struggling to find the right words.

Arguing with the Yorozuya over heaping bowlfuls of mayo at Snack Smile, Toshirou hadn’t stopped to think about the bystanders – the hostesses who would have been huddled around watching them. He had forgotten that anyone else was there, but they had been there – Shimura Tae prominently among them. Had some of what he had been feeling shown on his face? Had she seen something damning?

Toshirou had been exposing his own vulnerabilities far too much recently. He grimaced.

Finally, Shimura said, “I realized then that you weren’t lying. You’re just an idiot.”

Those words were too loaded for Toshirou to do much more than shrug them off.

“Say what you want. I’ve got to get going,” he said, furious at everyone and everything.

Shimura simply nodded, taking his retreat in stride. After a moment, she added, “Please take care of Gin-san.”

Take care of him? If she meant that in the kill him kind of way – the assassinate him dead kind of way –, Toshirou would be more than happy to oblige after all the grief that shithead had caused for him over the past week. But she didn’t mean it that way. Unfortunately.

Snorting roughly, he replied, “That guy doesn’t need anyone taking care of him.”

“Of course not, but it seems as though he wants you by his side all the same, so do well by him, Hijikata-san. Treat him right, or even your special cop buddies will never figure out where to find what’s left of your body,” she said with a dazzling smile.

As the so-called Demon Vice-Commander, he had a reputation to uphold, so he would never actually admit that her words legitimately chilled him.

Instead, in between casual puffs on his cigarette, he commented, “It’s a shame your deal with Kondo ended so quickly. The Shinsengumi could have gotten a lot from training under someone like you.”

“Do you really think so?” Shimura asked, seeming pleased. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have left that phone tip for the police director’s office right away.”

“That was you!” Toshirou exclaimed.

He had always wondered who had fed Pops Matsudaira the information about Kondo and Shimura’s deal. Even his wildest theories had not included Shimura herself as the culprit. It made no sense.

Sighing lightly, she said, “You didn’t actually think I was going to let that gorilla get away with hand-holding privileges, did you?”

“Then why did you even agree in the first place?”

Shimura gave him that same strange, indecipherable smile she had given him and the Yorozuya back at Snack Smile. It was gentle in a way that had him feeling on edge and defensive.

“Because,” she replied, “when he asked for my hand, he was doing so for your sake, not for himself.”

 

* * *

 

It was approaching ten at night when Toshirou rang the doorbell to the Yorozuya household for the second time that day. He ground his finger into the button, and felt the material bend under the pressure, but it didn’t quite break. He was tempted to punch it, but he really needed to save his fists for the asshole of the hour.

Speaking of which, the Yorozuya slid open the door and stared at him for the second time that day. After a poker-faced pause pregnant enough to be in its third trimester, he beckoned Toshirou in, lazily traipsing back down the hall to where the tinny sounds of late night TV could be heard.

“You’re here to trade back my yukata for your uniform, right?” he said. “I’ll bring your stuff out.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Toshirou replied, a little taken aback by the guy’s casual attitude.

After the terrible day he had, and considering how much of that terrible day was either directly or indirectly the Yorozuya’s fault, it would have been nice to find an easy excuse to give him a bloody nose, and he thought he was going to get that excuse when he showed up looking like he had thrown the guy’s precious Wednesday yukata in a blender and then poured a murder scene on top of it. The state of his precious clothing should have been a good enough declaration of war, but, instead, the Yorozuya had taken the opportunity to be strangely accommodating.

How fucking annoying.

Toshirou idled in the living room, watching Hanano Saki interview an old woman who had apparently saved the empty cans of everything she ever drank, and had cut them up and glued them together to make a miniature city. The camera then panned to that very city, which was, admittedly, incredibly elaborate. There were can skyscrapers, can parks, can roads, and even a motorized can train chugging its way along tracks encircling it all.

Suddenly, the wheels of the front can car collided with an errant pebble that had fallen on the can tracks and the whole can train feel sideways into a row of can houses. Everybody on screen looked very embarrassed.

Toshirou shifted his focus from the TV to the Yorozuya, who had just emerged from his bedroom carrying Toshirou’s uniform jacket.

“Where’s the rest of my stuff?” he asked.

“I wanted to start with this,” the Yorozuya said simply.

He walked right up to Toshirou and stared him straight in the eyes as he very slowly and deliberately ripped the left sleeve off the jacket.

“What the hell are you doing!” Toshirou shouted making a grab for his uniform, but the Yorozuya quickly pulled it out of reach.

“Well, you see, I’m from Earth,” he said in the most irritatingly patronizing voice Toshirou had ever heard. “And on Earth we human beings have this cultural thing we do – a silly little thing, really – where we treat the objects we borrow from others with care and consideration. I now realize you must not be from Earth, because you’re bringing me back my yukata looking like shit. You must be from… well, let’s just call it a shit culture. And I want to be sure to respect the traditions of your shit culture, so I’m going to follow your lead here and wreck the shit out of your uniform before returning it to you. Just to be polite, of course.”

With that, the Yorozuya sneered, hacked out a giant glob of spit onto the jacket, and dropped the whole mess in his giant dog’s dirty food dish.

“Now I’ll go and get your pants,” he snarled.

In some strange way, Toshirou felt relieved. No one was taking the higher ground, so they could all throw their own sucker punches in the mud. He waited until the Yorozuya returned and was making aggressive eye contact before ripping the last remaining sleeve off the guy’s Wednesday yukata and giving it to the dog, who sniffed it once before crinkling his nose and shaking his head in disgust.

“Yeah, I agree,” Toshirou said loudly to the animal. “It’s a terrible piece of clothing. It’s the worst. I would never wear it willingly if there were other options, and I’m ashamed to have it on now. I don’t know anyone in their right mind who would actually want to wear something like this.”

“We already established that your fashion sense was terrible in the last chapter” the Yorozuya remarked from the couch where he was taking a pair of scissors to Toshirou’s uniform pants. “I don’t know why you keep trying to hammer that point home. Do you want us to pity you?”

“Says the guy who refuses to put his yukata all the way on,” Toshirou sniped. “You need to realize that it just makes you look like a little kid whose mom forced him to wear these clothes he didn’t want to wear, so he puts one arm out of the sleeve when she’s not looking like he’s somehow winning back some pride that way, but it’s really just pathetic. You know you look like that right?”

“Hey, everyone,” the Yorozuya ignored him to instead shout at a bunch of invisible onlookers, waving his scissors about. “There goes poor, helpless Hijikata-kun, who probably thinks next year’s peak fall fashion will be 2D otaku bastard chic!”

“SHUT THE HELL UP AND GIVE ME BACK MY STUFF!” Toshirou roared.

“GLADLY!” came the response, followed by a pair of ragged booty shorts that had once been his uniform pants hitting him right in the face.

Snatching the material in a fist trembling with pent up rage, Toshirou decided it was time to get to the point.

“You know,” he said, “instead of ripping up my clothes, you could just come clean and say you don’t actually want me around.”

“What are you talking about? Couples rip each other’s clothes off all the time.”

“That’s not what anyone is doing here!”

“Sure it is. You rip my clothes, I rip your clothes, and as a result we grow closer together. It’s called a bonding experience, you son-of-a-bitch,” the Yorozuya said as he roughly pulled the buttons off of Toshirou’s uniformed shirt from where it lay crumpled in his lap among the remaining scraps of Toshirou’s mutilated uniform pant legs. “That’s my pet name for you, by the way. My sweet son-of-a-bitch.”

How the fuck did it come to this? How did it get to the point where the Yorozuya was ripping apart his belongings in the middle of night, while still insisting on carrying on with this poor excuse for a charade? There was nothing to be gained from any of this!

“Cut the crap, Yorozuya,” he snapped. “You don’t want to be with me. You never did. Just say it and we can all get on with our lives.”

“Wow, I didn’t realize you were this lazy. You’re the one who doesn’t want anything to do with me, and you’re trying to get me to do the work of ending things for you,” the Yorozuya replied, as he picked his nose and wiped the resulting boogers on Toshirou’s uniform vest. “Well, too bad! If you want out, you’re going to have to be a big boy and admit to it yourself. Or are you not yet done using your pull as resident Yorozuya boy toy to get Kagura to sniff out crooks for you?”

“Don’t call me your boy toy!” Toshirou growled. Is that why the Yorozuya thought he was doing this? “And don’t be stupid. I wouldn’t need to be dating you to get her help. Apparently, all anyone needs is a rice ball.”

“Who told you her weakness!” the Yorozuya gasped, dropping his scissors in shock.

“Feed her better and it will stop being such a weakness!”

“Hey, what gives you the right to judge us?” he demanded. “You hang out with Kagura for half a day and all of a sudden you’re an expert on her life?”

Toshirou narrowed his eyes at the deadbeat on the couch. Maybe he didn’t know everything there was to know about China, but he did know one thing: she cared about this guy. She cared about the Yorozuya enough to spend a day in some death tunnels with Toshirou. If the Yorozuya even returned a fraction of her sentiments, it should mean something to him that he was making her feel like she needed to do this.

“China thinks you’re serious,” he said. “She’s calling me Mami 4.”

“Number four, huh?” the Yorozuya mused thoughtfully. “I think I know about the first one, but who were the middle two?”

“That’s the point you’re focusing on here?”

“Ugh, stop complaining!” the Yorozuya grumbled, throwing Toshirou’s uniform vest to the floor and stomping on it spitefully. “You think you have it bad? Tetsu keeps popping up to ask me for suggestions on what he should buy you for your birthday – like I give a shit! I told him to try and find you a better personality, but it seems like they’re all out of that so you might just end up with a coupon for five free hugs.”

Toshirou was going to have to add a new Shinsengumi rule stating that any gift giving would require the giver to commit seppuku – unless the gift was mayonnaise. Or something else he actually wanted. He would have to work on the wording.

But that was also beside the point.

“If you’re having such a bad time, you know the way out. Stop being a shithead,” he snapped.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m having a _great_ time. Just the best,” the Yorozuya exclaimed through a monstrous smile, standing up and ambling aggressively into Toshirou’s personal space. “But if you’re not enjoying yourself, you should just admit to being the big fat faker you really are, and then be sure to let the door hit you hard on your ass on _your_ way out.”

What? Did the idiot think giving Toshirou a close up view of his nostril hairs was going to convince him to stand down? Not on his life.

If he gave up now, this whole terrible ordeal would have been for nothing. If he lied and said he didn’t actually give a shit about this guy, there would always be a part of him that would wonder what would happen if Gintoki knew the truth. He would be back to square one with trains of thought that just wouldn’t quit.

That was unacceptable. He was going to have to break the Yorozuya down. He had to make the Yorozuya be the one to step away. No matter what.

“You stink of sugar,” he commented with unfiltered disgust and frustration. There had to be a way to end this.

“Yeah, and I’m about to lick the parfait residue on my tongue all over the inside of your mouth, so you’d better get used to the stench, nicotine breath,” Gintoki said.

And there it was. The idiot just handed Toshirou his solution – his resolution. The Yorozuya must be betting all his chips on Toshirou running for the hills before he would have to follow through on anything.

Stupid move, dumbass. How many times was he going to have to tell this guy he’s all in before it actually sticks?

This seemed like it could be just that very time.

He grinned. “Not if I drown your mouth in my mayo residue first.”

Gintoki’s eyes sparked in challenge, and, in a mixture of surprise, panic, and a few other roiling emotions he wholeheartedly pushed aside, Toshirou realized that the son-of-a-bitch was actually going to go for it. Unless Toshirou beat him to the punch. In a breath, they both zoomed in on each other’s lips with such hurried force and minimal finesse that it was more of a mouths first headbutt than any kind of kiss.

Toshirou’s nose, already bashed about by China’s fist and flood water detritus, started gushing blood. The Yorozuya, on the other hand, seemed to have come out of the conflict relatively unscathed and utterly amused.

“Wow, you’re so hot for me that you’re already getting a nosebleed? I’m flattered, but you should really try and calm yourself down,” he jeered.

As blood from his nose coated his lips in a battle-ready red, Toshirou spat, “You’re one to talk! Is that a loose crown hanging off your tooth? Hold yourself together!”

The Yorozuya immediately fished a finger in his own mouth looking horrified.

“If I have to go back to the dentist because of you –” he started before realizing he had been had. He slowly slid his finger out of his mouth and glowered.

Toshirou laughed harder than he had all week, spraying flecks of nosebleed in the Yorozuya’s direction. The look on his face – all teeth and terror – had been priceless. It made up for, maybe, 5% of this week’s trauma, which was actually a pretty big piece of that insanely large pie.

“You – Shut up!” the Yorozuya growled and slammed his hands roughly onto the sides of Toshirou’s face, holding it firmly in place as he sealed his mouth over Toshirou’s open, laughing one.

Breathy guffaws gave way to something much more wet, and that involved a bit more lip movement. The salty taste of his own nosebleed blood blended together with a disgusting sweetness delivered by an invading, overly-aggressive tongue.

Did this guy think that tongues actually did battle for dominance? Did he think this was a goddamn wrestling match? Did he think he was Goku up against Vegeta in the World Martial Arts Tongue Tournament?

Toshirou bit down once, sharply, on the offending appendage, which immediately retreated, only to be replaced by a pair of unforgiving teeth chewing roughly on his lower lip. Blood and anger was coming from all corners, because, while they might not be using their words or fists to do it, they were still arguing like all hell.

Suddenly, the backs of Toshirou’s calves hit the edge of the couch – Since when had they gotten all the way over there? – and the both of them were falling. He hit the cushions with the Yorozuya sprawled on top of him, teeth scraping the side of his jaw and dipping down toward his neck. Without even thinking about it, Toshirou took the Yorozuya’s face – now smeared with blood and dirt that had been caked on Toshirou’s body –, and dragged the wandering mouth back up toward his own, getting only an amused grunt in response as he forcibly resumed the kiss.

Mouths connected, Toshirou let his hands drift down to the Yorozuya’s shoulder blades, bringing him in closer, closer, until the whole of his body weight was pressing him down, while one of the Yorozuya’s hands wrapped around the back of his head, pulling him up to deepen the kiss. The roughness of their movements was eroding into something more fluid, the two of them slotting together in a way that made Toshirou feel… really goddamn terrible.

The realization hit him with the weight of a freight train. It was terrible to know what this felt like – getting physical with the Yorozuya in a way that felt this _good_ –, because he was going to remember. When the play was all over, the farce revealed to be the farce that it was, Toshirou was going to remember how it felt to have Gintoki’s fingers dragging through his hair, Gintoki’s tongue pressing and dancing across already tingling and swollen lips, Gintoki’s thigh, heavy, pressing between his legs.

When it was all over, he was going to remember this, and it would have been so much easier if he never had to know.

 

* * *

 

When Toshirou arrived back at the barracks somewhere much later in the middle of a very long night, all he wanted to do was get a couple winks of shuteye before more shit hit the fan. Was that really so much to ask?

In the hallway, a mere five yards from the door to his quarters, Toshirou ran into Harada. The man looked at him skeptically.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked after a long silence.

Toshirou had returned to HQ in poor temper, while covered in blood, dirt, and viscera more than enough times for Harada to be more than used to it, so what was he getting at?

Finally, Toshirou looked down and realized he was still wearing the ragged remains of the Yorozuya’s Wednesday yukata. In the heat of the moment, he had forgotten all about that. After this whole shitty day, he still hadn’t been able to lay this stupid pile of rags to rest at the bottom of the Yorozuya’s larynx. Dammit.

“Don’t blame me if you’re not in the know about the latest fashion trends,” he growled at a largely befuddled Harada and escaped into his room, where he quickly disrobed and held his lighter up to the offending garment, but it was far too dirty and disgusting to even catch fire.

Feeling a wave of defeat sink into the very marrow of his bones, Toshirou slid to the floor, turning into a lifeless corpse atop his tatami mats that would not reanimate until morning.

 

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

_Five months later_

Toshirou barely jerked his hand away from the side of the sliding door quickly enough to avoid a ruthless skewering via kunai.

“When I was told that someone had paid an arm and a leg for the pleasure of my company this evening, I was not expecting you,” the woman said – her calm tone clearly contradicted by two fist-fulls of kunai, intertwined in all relevant fingers and poised at the ready. “Now that I am aware, I will have to up the price to a literal arm and a literal leg. Do you have a preference for which ones I take?”

The words ‘cheating scum’ where not applied to the end of that sentence, but were implied strongly enough that Toshirou heard them anyway.

“I bought your time to talk – not for anything else,” he said as plainly and as clearly as he could. Here was a misunderstanding that would best be put to rest as soon as possible.

Relaxing her throwing arm just a fraction, the woman looked mildly confused. Toshirou didn’t blame her.

She was dressed in the standard attire of a Yoshiwara courtesan, waiting for a customer in a room with one futon, two pillows, and an incredible number of mysteriously labeled bottles. It didn’t take a police investigation to connect the dots on this one – although, the dots gave the wrong answer in this case.

When Toshirou had approached the Yoshiwara head, Hinowa, requesting a meeting with the death god courtesan, he had been frozen out like many men must have been before him. _Tsukuyo,_ she had said firmly, _is not and never will be for sale at any price._

When Toshirou had made clear that the clandestine meeting would indeed just be a clandestine meeting, Hinowa had quickly changed her tune with a bright smile and a twinkle in her eye, but that twinkle had apparently been a mischievous one.

“They didn’t tell you,” he concluded.

Scrambling to her feet, righting a kimono that had been sliding off to reveal the curve of her left shoulder ‘just so,’ while clearly fighting a terrible flush filling her cheeks despite a copious covering of rouge, she stammered, “No. No, they _did_ tell me. I just forgot. I get so many customers in a night that it can be hard to keep my schedule straight.”

Giving her a moment to compose herself, Toshirou stepped into the room and grabbed the hilt of one of the kunai now embedded in the door to slide it closed behind him. He went to sit in the one chair in the corner before realizing there was a dildo sticking out of it, and instead chose to lean awkwardly against the wall. As he lit a cigarette, the woman took a rough drag from her kiseru. They smoked in silence, listening to the drone of the cicadas and the rhythmic, unmistakable slap of a paddle hitting buttocks coming from the other side of the wall.

“So,” she began, “are you here as the Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi or Gintoki’s lover?”

“I’m not-!” he bit out, before swallowing the protest. “Okay, the last one,” he muttered and waved his hand in a vague, gruff motion.

It had taken him months of recon and a good sized pile of money to get this tête-à-tête, so he was sure as hell going to use it for its intended purpose – pride be damned. To solve a Yorozuya problem, he supposed he would have to actually admit he had one.

He took a breath and said, “I want you to convince the Yorozuya to break it off.”

The woman raised her eyebrows and asked, “Break what off? Bedroom advice will cost extra, you know.”

“Not that,” he said quickly, focusing with all his might on not following her train of thought into whatever terrible station it had ended up. “The whole thing. Confess to him, so that he goes to you.”

If possible, she looked even more skeptical.

“You want me to steal your lover?”

If Toshirou heard the word lover one more time, he was going to steal the paddle those two perverts were using next door and whack himself in the head with it hard enough so that he passed out.

“Yes,” he replied through gritted teeth.

And the woman had the audacity to ask: “Why?”

He could tell her that he had had Yamazaki do a full report on her history and how that intertwined with the Yorozuya’s, but he doubted that would go over well.

“You two seem to get along,” he supplied vaguely.

The woman nodded at this.

“Yes, we do,” she said, eyes sharp. “I think he is a good man, which is why I would never want to get in the way of his happiness like you are suggesting now.”

“But he isn’t happy,” Toshirou insisted, finally feeling like he was getting somewhere. “He doesn’t actually want any of this.”

“That’s not what it looked like on TV,” she replied.

Goddammit! Had everyone seen that? Who even watched daytime filler anyway? And why did they all keep bringing it up? It had happened…

 

_Three months earlier_

 

The terrible part was that now everyone was starting to get in on it.

Toshirou looked up at Sougo as the stupid kid smiled cheerfully back after having just kicked him bodily out of the passenger’s seat and into the snow.

“This is why you took that detour,” Toshirou accused with a boiling irritation, stumbling to his feet.

They had been driving back to the barracks after questioning a suspect when Sougo had suddenly veered off course and kicked him into this snowbank.

“You can thank me later, Homokata-san,” Sougo said, looking like he understood exactly just how much this was pissing Toshirou off, before closing the door and speeding away.

He glared daggers at the disappearing police car, as he was enveloped within the shelter of an umbrella with a far-too-familiar arm wrapped around his waist, while a far-too-familiar voice called out, “Appreciate the delivery, Souba-kun!”

Toshirou caught his reactive snarl before it could fully form and did his best to change it into something more warm and welcoming as he looked over at the dumbass permhead in the snow. According to the smug, knowing smirk stamped on the idiot’s face, he had mostly failed.

Because it wasn’t just Sougo. And while it was mostly Kondo, it was a whole lot of assholes as well, who decided it was their business to make sure Toshirou bumped, ran, or flew into the Yorozuya sometime in the middle of his day, like they thought they were doing him some kind of shitty favor. Even when his schedule was impossibly tied up, he still ended up seeing the guy at least three or four times a week. This time this week was goddamn number five.

“I didn’t expect to see you today,” he said, which was the closest to yelling, ‘ _Why the fuck do you keep ending up in my life?_ ’ that he could manage in this situation.

“You always say that when this happens,” the Yorozuya replied. “And people say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result, but you don’t let that bother you. I think that’s great.”

Not to be outdone, Toshirou wrapped his own arm around the piece-of-shit’s waist, saying, “It’s because I’m surprised each time. Whenever I get to see you walking upright and participating in normal society instead of being a layabout, jobless samurai, it’s just so out of the ordinary and such a relief.”

The arm gripping Toshirou’s waist tightened.

“It’s sweet when you worry about me, my considerate tax thief.”

The Yorozuya had taken to referring to Toshirou with his standard insults, but with an extra possessive pronoun and pointless adjective attached.

“What else would I do with my virtually non-existent free time?” Toshirou cooed, blowing out a cloud of smoke directly into the Yorozuya’s face.

“Well, you could start by going grocery shopping with Patsuan and me,” he said, giving Toshirou a wet kiss on the cheek, leaving residue much stickier than the standard fare of saliva to the point that Toshirou could nearly feel the sugar slowly crystallizing onto the side of his face. “We could use your money.”

“Don’t you dare bring me into this, Gin-san,” a muffled voice said from behind them, and Toshirou turned to see glasses covering his glasses with his hands and the tense, trembling body language of someone one last push away from snapping.

It was a great emotional state for a criminal you were interrogating, but far less great for a kid holding your shopping bags.

“What are you talking about?” The Yorozuya responded to the kid’s tension by entirely ignoring it in favor of using the handle of his umbrella to scratch the back of his ear, dumping snow right onto Toshirou’s head in a way that seemed accidental, but _definitely_ wasn’t. “I was just trying to include you in mooching some free food off of this guy. You should be grateful!”

Removing his hands from his glasses, glasses stared them both down with the eyes of someone who had seen far too much.

“I’d rather starve, thanks,” he said.

Sighing, the Yorozuya turned to Toshirou and said, “You’re going to have to forgive Shinpachi. He’s in his rebellious stage – I’m sure you know the one, because you still haven’t grown out of yours –, so it’s going to take him some time to accept our relationship.”

“Who would accept this?” glasses snapped, gesticulating vague irritated motions into the air. “Who would even call it a relationship? You’re both just taking pot shots while groping each other. It’s weird, and disgusting!”

Silently, Toshirou had to agree, but he couldn’t ever say it because then the Yorozuya would think he had the upper hand. The fucker.

“Wow,” said fucker was replying, “I would have expected you, of all people, to understand that love comes in all forms. I didn’t give you this sort of attitude when you were making out with a bug.”

“She wasn’t just a bug! Pandemonium-san and I actually cared for each other,” glasses shouted shrilly, “but with you two it looks like someone just stuck you both in a Get Along Shirt weeks ago and forgot about it!”

Toshirou shared a look with the Yorozuya.

Just as he opened his mouth, the Yorozuya did too, and in near perfect unison they said, “ _He’s_ the one that –”

“Really not helping your case here!” glasses interrupted, throwing his arms up in an expression of defeat, and marching away down the sidewalk.

Admittedly, the kid had a point. What the Yorozuya had called a relationship was nothing more than an arm wrestling match that had been hovering at the most frustrating stalemate for almost two months now. And no matter how hard he tried, Toshirou couldn’t seem to gain any ground toward victory – if anything, he seemed to be losing it. Feelings for Yorozuya Station was now a towering structure at the heart of the main commuter line, and the train conductors were constantly sending his trains in Yorozuya-related directions at all hours of the fucking day. It kept making him want to do things, say things.

Like right now. He just kept thinking about how Gintoki and his little brats would light up at a little extra food around the house.

“No more than 6000 yen,” he muttered finally, avoiding eye contact as he puffed smoke out into the chilled air.

It seemed to take the Yorozuya a moment to trace the conversation back far enough for those words to make sense, but, when he did, his smile looked strangely genuine. It wasn’t an expression Toshirou had ever seen directed toward him, and, now that it was, he had no idea what to do with it.

“Feeling generous today, are we, my sweet Hijikata-kun?”

Why was it so warm all of a sudden? Were they standing next to an outdoor heater?

The strange mood that had invaded this conversation had Toshirou feeling defensive, raw, and on edge. He was about to derail it all with a demand to veto any grocery items that he deemed too idiotic to pay for, but, before he could open his mouth, a pair of cameras was shoved in his face.

One of Oedo TV’s reporters was standing in front of him, saying, “No one was expecting a snowstorm this late into March. How are you taking the surprising weather?”

When it came to reporters, Toshirou was more used to getting aggressive questions lobbed at him from the other side of police tape at grizzly crime scenes than he was getting stopped on the street for a pointless segment about the weather.

It was far enough away from his business-as-usual that he hesitated for just the amount of time the Yorozuya needed to lean into the mic and calmly say, “Experiencing the snow with my lover immerses me in this special feeling. I like it.”

No one knew what to do with that, least of all Toshirou. Two speeding trains of thought collided in midair, and the ensuing explosion was worse than anyone could have expected, because it turned out that one of the figurative trains had been carrying multiple crates filled with fireworks and gunpowder.

He opened his mouth and literal smoke leaked out, because he had just taken a drag from his cigarette before the Yorozuya had decided to… to…

The two guys behind the camera started whispering.

“Is that… is he talking about the Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi? That’s Hijikata Toshirou, right?”

“I think so. And he’s... Is he blushing?”

Toshirou drew his sword.

“I’m confiscating this footage. Police business!” he exclaimed, trying to swipe his sword at the camera to destroy any and all evidence, but was held back by a stubbornly strong pair of arms.

“Sorry about him,” the Yorozuya was saying to the reporter from quite literally behind his back. “He’s just really shy, you know?”

“GO TO HELL, YOROZUYA!”

 

* * *

 

“You looked more upset by it all than he did,” the woman said, because if people weren’t bringing up the Yorozuya’s ridiculous words from that TV segment, they were talking about Toshirou’s failed attempts to chop cameras in half.

It had been a true and terrible PR massacre. Kondo had been forced to put him on a week-long suspension, to Sougo’s utter glee.

Fortunately, Yamazaki had been able to smuggle him the most urgent paperwork and reports, so, on a fundamental level, he didn’t miss much, and was still able to contribute where needed from the shadows. Unfortunately, Yamazaki had also told the Yorozuya the room number of the hotel Toshirou was using during his suspension, so the bastard had popped in at all hours with stupid job postings cut out of newspapers and ripped from flyers stapled to telephone poles – things like lazy parents asking for birthday party clowns and old farts looking for in-home nurses.

 _I know how much you hate layabout, jobless samurai, so I’m just trying to give you the opportunity to feel better about yourself,_ the Yorozuya would taunt, and they would fight – and sometimes do other things, but mostly fight.

“He said what he said on camera to irritate me,” Toshirou replied darkly. “Or because I was about to buy him some groceries. Hell if I know.”

“So you think he’s just dating you for your grocery money?” she asked. “He could do better than you for a sugar daddy.”

“You think too highly of him,” Toshirou responded reflexively before shaking his head. They were getting off track. “He’s doing this purely to piss me off.”

“That does sound like Gintoki,” the woman admitted, teeth flashing in a wry smile, barely there before it was gone. “But how can you be so sure?”

Well, if she wanted proof, Toshirou had more than enough to convince anyone. Five months full of pure, unfiltered bullshit.

 

_Two months earlier_

 

China wound up her arm and threw the bowling ball like a lesser organism might chuck a pebble. The ball still hadn’t touched the ground by the time it collided with the pins, sending each and every one flying. This was followed by a terribly mechanical crash, as smoke and rubble spewed out of the dark opening at the end of the lane.

China crowed and gave the watching crowd composed of Toshirou, the Yorozuya, Sougo, and a traumatized bowling alley employee the peace sign.

"Who do you think you are? I am,” she exclaimed, pumping a fist.

The Yorozuya gave a mild-mannered clap, Sougo stared blankly, and the bowling alley employee hiccuped through their tears, while Toshirou asked, “What did she just say?”

“Her victory phrase. Weren’t you listening?” the Yorozuya responded dully. “She’s been watching bowling victory video compilations at the net cafe for days to prepare for this.”

China plopped into the seat next to him, kicking her legs out energetically.

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve never bowled before, so I wanted to make sure I was ready with the right kind of ending catchphrase.”

“But did you watch any videos of people actually bowling – not just what they say at the end?”

She looked insulted.

“You just have to throw a ball at some pins. What’s there to learn about that?”

When China had come up to Toshirou a week ago and asked him to join her bowling team, it had seemed like one of the easier options. Ever since their first ‘mami-daughter day’, she had insisted on the two of them having regular bonding activities that varied in extremes from learning to juggle flaming swords to just sitting on the sidewalk and noting the color of the cars that passed.

If he refused her requests enough times in a row, she would start getting mopey and asking if him and the Yorozuya were having problems and if he would still feed her sometimes after the divorce. If he didn’t cave after that, she would stop talking to him all together in exchange for occasionally trailing him when he was out on patrol, staring forlornly in his direction from a distance. Whenever they would lock eyes, “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan would start to play, clouds would cover the sun, and the girl would start throwing larger and larger rocks at his head.

He would have to walk up to her and take her to a movie or sit her down and share a plate of dango, whenever it got to that point.

China’s last two invitations had been to a nail salon and cock-fighting, neither of which Toshirou agreed to for two very different reasons. His set of refusals had pushed her to the point where she was asking if he would be paying the Yorozuya alimony when she brought up bowling. He couldn’t say yes fast enough.

Maybe they would write that phrase on his tombstone after all this was over.

“It really is amazing that you could fail so completely at something so simple,” Sougo said to China, who glared at him from where she was fixing the lacing on one of her bowling shoes.

While Sougo and the Yorozuya had tagged along today under the guise of ‘spectating’, Toshirou knew they were both official members of the ‘let’s show up and see how the shit hits the fan with this one’ party. Or maybe, in Sougo’s case, it was more of the ‘let’s throw shit at the fan and see whose face it ends up in’ party.

“I didn’t fail,” China snorted. “I got all the pins. That means I win.”

“I could point my bazooka at the pins and get the same result,” Sougo drawled. “I would say use your head and learn the rules, but I know that’s impossible for you.”

“Is not,” she snapped. “I’ll show you. I’ll use a head right now!”

She grabbed Sougo by the collar and threw him head-first down the lane. Not a pin was left standing as Sougo’s body slid to a halt. He scrambled to get up, bazooka in hand, when, suddenly, staring at something beyond where the Yorozuya and Toshirou were seated, his eyes widened. He quickly dropped back down to the floor of the lane, playing dead.

Ignoring China’s victory cry of “Who do you think you are? I am!”, Toshirou turned around to see the gigantic hulking mass of the monster from hell looming behind his seat, its flower wobbling ominously on its head between two massive horns and a sinister frown. It was wearing a shirt far too small for it – so much so that the material was in the midst of being ripped apart, just like the beast did to humans probably. The shirt said “Bowling for Soup,” because this thing must turn bowlers into soup.

Today really was going to end up being the day he died.

“You must excuse me, as I am rather new at bowling, but I have to ask,” Satan said, “do we actually have to throw humans at the pins? That seems rather violent.”

A small, unassuming girl commented, “You really should have said on the flyer that you were using humans, Kagura-sama. I could have brought some along.”

Toshirou had not realized that someone was standing next to the harbinger of death, but now that she was speaking, he noticed she had the largest club he had ever seen strapped to her back. And horns. And humans she could use for bowling?

“What flyer?” Toshirou asked, his voice sounding strangely squeaky to his own ears.

“For our bowling team,” China clarified. “We need four people. Me and Mami 4 makes two,” – she patted Toshirou on the shoulder – “but that left us with two open spots.”

“The Yorozuya and Sougo were already here!”

“This is one of our mami-daughter days. They can’t play,” China said, frowning, like that should have been obvious. “So I thought we could get our other two with a flyer. I’m glad some people decided to show up!”

Just where had she put that flyer? What place could she have stuck it that would have drawn the eyes of creatures that seemed ready to eat his worst nightmares for breakfast?

“I saw the flyer and knew bowling would be such fun. I will do my best to learn quickly and not hold the team back,” evil incarnate said before holding out a massive, green, clawed hand it was probably planning to use to crush Toshirou’s skull. “We have met before, but perhaps enough time has passed that I should introduce myself again. I am not always the best at leaving a lasting impression. I am Kagura-chan’s neighbor, Hedoro.”

“And I am the shikigami Gedoumaru,” the girl with the huge club said before dashing off to the side and returning in half a moment. She had her arm wrapped around the Yorozuya’s pale, twitching neck. “Your bowling ball was rolling away, so I brought it back.”

“Thanks,” Toshirou managed, sharing a frantic glance with the guy in the shikigami choke hold. “That bowling ball has really been acting up recently. You should give it to me, so I can go and get it checked out at the front desk.”

The shikigami shook her head.

“No, no,” she said. “I’ve used Gintoki-sama as a projectile before. He is a little fluffy, but you just need to put your back into the throw and make sure he is going fast enough so that the fluff becomes scruff.”

What did that even mean?

“Let me show you,” she said.

Did that mean she was going to kill him? Toshirou really would rather this whole dating farce thing was cleared up before either of them died. Loose ends were irritating.

Lips turning blue, the Yorozuya let out a fruitless gurgle.

In one swift motion, the shikigami sent him flying. The force of the Yorozuya’s head hitting the first bowling pin actually caused the pin to snap in half, while the others were flung violently across the building. One ended up stuck, almost entirely submerged in the ceiling.

The shikigami turned back to face the team, two fingers raised, declaring, “Who do you think you are? I am.”

Why was it that everyone knew that phrase, but no one knew anything about how to actually bowl!

“I’ll… I’ll go get my ball,” Toshirou offered.

Sliding down the lane, he skidded to a halt just in front of China trying to slap the Yorozuya awake.

“C’mon, Gin-chan,” she was saying earnestly. “There’s nine more frames to play. You’re not going to make it through with that sort of attitude.”

“Nobody’s going to make it through if we have to play nine more frames of this,” Toshirou said as a cold sweat gathered on the back of his neck.

Out of his periphery, he watched the trembling, weeping bowling alley employee help the green monster and the shikigami try on bowling shoes at the front of the store. What was even the point of that? Given enough time, they could just use the skulls of the people they killed during this game as shoes.

“We’re taking a rain check,” Toshirou continued. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”

“No way,” China replied firmly, continuing to shake the Yorozuya by the shoulders as she did so. “We haven’t had a mami-daughter day in weeks!”

“If you have a way to get us all out of here,” Sougo hissed from his prone position in the neighboring lane, “I will move up my plan to overthrow Hijikata as Vice-Commander and kick him out of the Shinsengumi by the end of the month. That should give you unlimited mami-daughter days.”

Dropping the Yorozuya mid-shake, China looked disconcertingly intrigued.

“I bet I could convince Gin-chan to put him on the Yorozuya team,” she murmured.

“No. No. Wait,” Toshirou said urgently.

If Sougo got China on his side in his attempts to destroy Toshirou’s career, things could actually start getting dangerous. That stupid kid was putting him in a position where running right now meant putting his place within the Shinsengumi in jeopardy.

So this was a battle he was going to have fight, no matter the consequences.

“I forgot we had Sougo here,” Toshirou continued brightly. “That means we do have enough bowling balls, and won’t need to cancel.”

China responded to this with a grin, while Sougo sent a truck-full of unintelligible curses his way.

“That means you’ll play?” China asked gripping her limp Yorozuya bowling ball by its perm.

“Of course,” he replied as he yanked his struggling Sougo bowling ball up by the ear. “I said I would.”

 

* * *

 

“And through that whole bowling game from hell, the Yorozuya never even woke up,” Toshirou groused. “For days afterward, he claimed to have a mixture of amnesia and a concussion. He’s had amnesia too many times in this series already. That plot point is overused.”

The woman was giving him the same look he often gave to people who were being a dumbass.

“You’re using this story as an example of how Gintoki is trying to annoy you through pretending to be in a relationship?” she asked, obviously befuddled.

“You’re not getting the nuance of it,” Toshirou insisted. “He was obviously faking being unconscious so he wouldn’t have to deal with the shikigami and the monster, leaving me alone to take care of it.”

“And then he pretended to have head trauma for days after just to sell the ruse,” she concluded dryly.

“He called me Hijikata-san,” Toshirou said, nodding. It had been fucking creepy.

There was no way a collision with a few bowling pins could take the Yorozuya out for the count. He was stronger than that. It was one of the reasons Toshirou knew there was no point in worrying about him. That guy would always bounce back. No matter what. Unless he was scheming to heap responsibility for a situation onto someone else. Asshole.

After a moment, the woman said, “I think you should go home to your lover.”

Toshirou lit another cigarette and sat down on the floor next to the dildo chair, stubbornly declaring his intent to stay right where he was.

“I see you’re not convinced, but I have one last story to tell that should allow us to come to an understanding,” he said.

He hadn’t wanted to tell it, but he knew it would do the trick. As long as he left out all the confidential details, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Settling down next to the opposite wall, the woman sighed and shrugged.

“It’s your money,” she said.

 

_Two weeks earlier_

 

It was nearing two in the morning as Toshirou stood shoulder to shoulder with Kondo in a small, unmarked room in a secured corner of the Oedo Central Terminal, eyes scanning across row upon row of blinking monitors. They were waiting for the moment some of those punks in scream masks would show up in full view of a security camera on a main thoroughfare in the city, and tag a wall with some anti-Shogun graffiti.

At first, this stupid graffiti spree had been nothing more than a minor annoyance to the Shinsengumi, but then Toshirou had his first mami-daughter day with China, which had led to an encounter in some old, shitty tunnels with the government’s top hydraulics engineer gone rogue. When Toshirou had informed Kondo that Miura Osamu had admitted to not only working with the graffiti group, but had also provided a deadly demonstration of one of his carefully crafted assassination plots for high level government officials, his Commander had escalated the issue to one of top concern.

However, right when the Shinsengumi started to put some serious resources into catching and interrogating these guys, the graffiti group became much harder to find. When Toshirou would put a team of men at locations A, B, and C, graffiti would pop up at location D.

It was as if they knew what the Shinsengumi would do before they did it.

It was enough to make Toshirou wonder if Osamu had made it out of those tunnels alive on that day, just like him and China. If anyone had enough misplaced brains and inside knowledge to fuck around with government operations to this extent, it was probably that shithead.

Whoever it was, they were competent enough to have the Shinsengumi chasing their tails over some simple graffiti, so this had the potential to get a lot worse.

Which was when Pops Matsudaira got the Shinsengumi permission to access the Mimawarigumi’s unclassified security cameras. And finally, after a week of staring at grainy footage of nothing happening, they finally got their lead.

Toshirou already had his radio up to his face and was belting orders the moment a masked individual appeared in the footage of a storefront near the edge of the city. After a flurry of responses, it became clear that no member of the Shinsengumi was anywhere near the location. The quickest anyone could get there would be in ten minutes.

It was if those graffiti fuckers had known just where the hole in their patrol net would be. Goddammit.

As his men raced to the location, the tech on duty got an audio feed coming through, which was mainly filled with the hiss of compressed air as cans were shook and sprayed.

A few minutes after they were spotted, the graffiti group was almost done with their artistic rendering of a naked Shogun giving an enthusiastic blowjob to an Amanto. Toshirou clenched his fist, feeling the bitter taste of a failed operation even before it was done.

Which was when the worst possible voice he could hear at a time like this came crackling through the audio feed: “You didn’t really paint his balls lumpy enough. It’s almost like you’ve never actually seen the guy naked, which is hard, because he’s pretty much always stripping.”

The two guys in scream masks looked about ready to scream themselves, based on their body language. Jumping in the air, they both turned to see a stupid, obviously dead-drunk samurai stumbling his way toward them.

Toshirou ran to the monitor, clasping its edges with both hands, as he hissed, “Yorozuya!”

The only thing worse than a failed stakeout would be the Yorozuya sticking his nose in this. Knowing Toshirou’s luck, the asshole would probably put on his own scream mask and join the group before the night was out.

“Who are you?” one of the guys asked sharply.

“Me?” the Yorozuya replied, visibly swaying even in the grainy footage. “I’m not important. Not like you. You’re all I hear about these days.”

“Watch the news a lot, do you?” a scream mask scoffed. “Then you know we’re good enough that even the cops can’t touch us. Better scram before we decide to deal with you.”

The Yorozuya casually waved his hand, shaking his head. Then he put his hands to his head, looking like he regretted the motion of shaking it in the first place.

“No, that’s not it,” he said, mumbling through his hand. “I only ever see the weather segment of the news. It’s the only part worth watching, and they never talk about you on there. I don’t hear about you on the news.”

The Yorozuya wobbled in the direction of the graffiti. Standing between the masked men, he seemed to look up at the freshly painted Shogun.

“No, you’re the reason I can never enjoy a parfait in peace these days!” he shouted, stabbing his sword right through the balls of the leader of Japan.

The two guys jumped back, one of them falling flat on their ass in the dirt.

“Man, you’re crazy,” the one remaining upright said. “Get out of here!”

The Yorozuya turned around, leaving his sword embedded in the wall as he stalked toward them.

“Let me explain,” he said. “You see, I’m dating this guy.”

“What the fuck?” Toshirou and one of the masked men said at exactly the same time.

“I know, right? Ridiculous. Anyway, it’s kind of his job to make you cut this shit out. And you’re making it hard for him to do his job, so he gets these phone calls all the time when we have lunch. He thinks I don’t know what they’re about because he gets all terse and secretive with his one or two word responses, but when he says shit like ‘which wall?’ what the fuck else would he be talking about? Is he talking to a contractor about adding an extra wing to the Shinsengumi man-mansion or something? Not with my tax dollars he isn’t!”

With furious movements, the Yorozuya stepped on the leg of the one man trying to crawl away and grabbed the other by the shoulder roughly enough to elicit a yelp.

“Where are you going? I’m not finished,” he declared ominously. “So, as I was saying, you guys keep giving him shit to deal with, which makes him smoke. He smokes already, but with you guys it’s this whole other level. Particularly these last few weeks. You need a gas mask just to get in a one meter radius of him these days, and I’m sitting right across from him in a restaurant booth, so I’m right in the middle of it. Layers and layers of smoke just soaking into my parfait. Have you ever scooped up the contents of an ashtray and poured it on top of a parfait?”

There was stone-cold silence. Toshirou could feel Kondo looking at him, and it was at that moment he realized he was hurriedly clicking his lighter underneath a new cigarette. After a pause, he took the cigarette out of his mouth, unlit, and put it back in the pack. Maybe…. Maybe he’d had enough for today.

“Well, have you?” the Yorozuya pursued in the monitor, to which he received two quiet head shakes.

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “It tastes like shit.”

“Then maybe don’t eat parfaits around him?” came one hesitant suggestion.

“Where would I get the money to do that?” the Yorozuya snapped. “If he’s there, he pays, which is usually the only way I’m getting one. I’ve tried sweet talking the waitress, but it never works out like it does in the movies. My options are ashtray parfait or no parfait at all, so I’ve just been sitting here shoveling sweet smoke down my throat like I’m Santa Claus going head first down the chimney of a house that left chestnuts roasting on a fire down there.”

It was at this juncture that the man on the floor pointed at the Yorozuya, saying, “I remember you now. You’re the guy that was on TV with the Shinsengumi Vice-Commander in the snow!”

HAD THE ENTIRE PLANET SEEN THAT CLIP?

Kondo put a warm, sympathetic hand on Toshirou’s shoulder, which was almost enough to make him unclench his jaw. Almost.

“Ah, so you _do_ know me,” the Yorozuya was replying. “It seems as though we both know each other, which would, in a way, make us pals. So, could you do your old friend a solid and stop drawing Shogun dicks on the walls?”

“Sure, yeah, whatever you say,” one of the men replied quickly.

“That’s nice of you, thanks,” the Yorozuya drawled, releasing the shoulder and leg of both guys at once.

The two of them scrambled away and were immediately cut off from escape by a police car screeching to a halt.

“Vice-Commander! We have them,” a voice – Ninomiya – shouted over the radio.

As they cuffed the perps, his men waved at the Yorozuya. They had really started acting far too friendly toward him ever since he got involved with Toshirou. Why weren’t they questioning this former rebel as to why he was on the scene of a crime in progress?

“Thank you, sir,” Ninomiya said, throwing sand on Toshirou’s wounds by immediately coming to the correct conclusion that the Yorozuya had indeed been helping them out.

“I’ll take my thank you in cash,” the Yorozuya replied with a grin that seemed to throw off his center of balance enough that he fell face first into the dirt.

Kondo, who had been mercifully, uncharacteristically silent throughout the whole ordeal finally took the opportunity to say, “You got yourself a good one, Toshi.”

Slowly letting his fingers slide off the monitor, Toshirou watched as the Yorozuya threw up on Ninomiya’s shoes. He gave Kondo the side-eye, which, as always, had utterly no effect on his commander.

“Take him to the non-smoking section of the restaurant sometimes,” Kondo continued, patting Toshirou firmly on the back.

But that was the strange part. The Yorozuya had never once complained to Toshirou about his smoking habits. He might use them to insult him, sure, calling him a diseased lung or a nicotine addict, but they must have had lunch five or six times over the past month and the Yorozuya had not so much as mentioned being annoyed with the level of smoke during any of them.

Which didn’t make sense. He wasn’t the type of guy to keep his complaints bottled up, particularly when it came to Toshirou. The Yorozuya had yelled at him for breathing too loud when Ketsuno Ana was on TV once.

That meant that Gintoki must have been lying about those smoky parfaits – making up a story to give Toshirou’s men time to make their arrests. That was the only possibility that made any sense. Anything else was simply… unthinkable.

And it was a lie that would cost the Shinsengumi, in the end. Mere hours after they had been caught, the two crooks vanished from their holding cell without a trace. They kept their promise to the Yorozuya in the weeks that followed, with no new graffiti appearing anywhere throughout the city. The group had gone to ground, leaving all trails and leads scattered to the winds, unrecoverable.

 

* * *

 

“So because the Yorozuya lied about his parfaits to a classified group, a classified operation can no longer work toward finding out classified information,” Toshirou summarized.

He hadn’t been able to tell the woman a majority of the story, due to its classified nature, but he was sure he managed to communicate the important parts.

“You must be convinced of his motivations now,” he said.

She appeared contemplative, studying Toshirou’s face with an intensity that almost took him aback.

“I am convinced of one thing,” she said. “Gintoki needs to be presented with a chance to prove himself, one way or another.”

Toshirou tilted his head in agreement. That was exactly what he wanted. The Yorozuya had to be put in a situation where he was forced to show his true colors, or at least where his priorities lay. That was the only way they could end this.

“In that case, we may be able to help you,” the woman offered easily enough.

“We?”

“Yoshiwara,” she clarified. “Our city specializes in off-brand seduction. If a client has someone they desire, we can approximate that very encounter with someone who looks, sounds, and acts almost exactly like them. In Gintoki’s case, his fondness for Ketsuno Ana is well known, and, while we cannot provide her as an option, we can get close enough.”

Toshirou had originally come here to convince the Hyakka head to bat her eyelashes at the Yorozuya, but her suggestion wasn’t sounding half bad. If Yoshiwara could produce someone that could get Gintoki to look at them with half the passion he had when he looked at the finger pointing toward the cold front coming in later in the week, this might actually work.

“For a price,” she emphasized, “we can have Muneno Tanima attempt to seduce your lover.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While Ketsuno Ana is Japanese for butt hole, Muneno Tanima is Japanese for cleavage. Particularly the boob kind.
> 
>  
> 
> I memed it up a bit in this chapter. Here’s some background on a few:
> 
> [Get Along Shirt](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/get-along-shirt)
> 
> [Special Feeling](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/special-feeling-%E7%89%B9%E5%88%A5%E3%81%AA%E6%B0%97%E5%88%86)  
> -A [few](https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=41695182) fun [examples](https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=41555358) of [Gintama](https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=41569551) special [feelings](https://www.pixiv.net/member_illust.php?mode=medium&illust_id=41530808).
> 
> [Who do you think you are? I am!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKQOXYB2cd8)


	7. Chapter 7

Toshirou looked at the sniper rifles in their hands and the glistening, black sunglasses covering their eyes. For a moment, the only sound was the wind whistling its way across the rooftop, blowing him back into a past full of terrible amusement park rides, besotted daughters of superior officers – de gozaru –, and incredibly stuffy full-body mayonnaise suits that smelled much more of latex than what he had always imagined being inside a mayonnaise bottle would actually be like.

This couldn’t be happening again, could it?

“Kondo-san, what are you doing?” he asked, attempting to address who he hoped would be the most reasonable.

“Who is Kondo?” Kondo responded, cocking his gun and dashing Toshirou’s tepid hopes all at once. “I’m Gorilla 13.”

“I’m Sougo 13. Ready for action,” Sougo chimed in, looking torn between playing his serious character straight and sneering at Toshirou. Neither urge won out entirely, leaving Jekyll and Hyde micro-expressions to flash across his face from second to second.

“And I’m Tae 13,” Shimura said, her voice somehow lower and more authoritative than the rest. “We are here as the judge, jury, and executioner.”

Judges and juries didn’t hold guns like that! This was just a pack of would-be murderers! He wasn’t sure who they were looking to shoot at this point, nor was he sure he wanted to know.

“Whatever this is, you should stop,” Toshirou attempted.

“Of course. But we’re doing it anyway,” Kondo assured him, like he thought he was giving the answer Toshirou wanted. “We’re here to support you as you test Gintoki’s commitment.”

This was about him? Shit!

“How did you know about that?” Toshirou snapped.

He had been very careful to keep his plan with Yoshiwara’s Hyakka leader under wraps. The more people who knew about this, the greater the possibility it could get back to the Yorozuya, or worse, something like what was happening right now could happen.

“Yamazaki spilled the beans,” Sougo said. “It was easy to get him to talk once I laced his anpan with some special spices.”

“What special spices?”

“It’s a recipe from my home town,” Sougo replied, flapping his free hand dismissively. “You wouldn’t have heard of it.”

“We have the same home town!” Toshirou bellowed as his last remaining threads of patience disappeared. He charged in the stupid kid’s direction, sword in hand.

“Now, now. Settle down, Toshi,” Kondo said as Sougo smoothly side-stepped out of the way of each angered swipe of Toshirou’s blade. “I know this must be an emotional day for you, but that’s why we’re here.”

“If Gin-san really turns out to be a cheating scoundrel,” Shimura explained with a serene smile, “we’re ready to shoot him down like the bastard dog he’d be in that scenario.”

Pausing in his assault against Sougo, Toshirou held in a grimace. There was no doubt the woman meant exactly what she said, which spelled bad news for the plan.

Since the Yorozuya didn’t actually have any investment in this thing he had going with Toshirou, there would be no reason for him to refuse the advances of someone who was exactly his type. He was going to fall for Muneno Tanima and then fall directly onto the floor with a bullet in his head. All Toshirou had wanted was some proof of the Yorozuya’s bullshit, not his corpse.

Why couldn’t things ever be simple! Why couldn’t a straightforward, weeks-in-the-making plan to double-bluff someone out of a half-year long fake relationship just work the way it was supposed to?

“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” he tried.

“Absolutely not,” Shimura assured him, like she thought she was giving the answer Toshirou wanted. “As the person who caused the two of you to get together, I am personally responsible for all of this. I will see that responsibility through to the end.”

“Me too,” Kondo exclaimed. “I am a big part of why you two became a couple as well, so both my shoulder and gun are here if things go south!”

What a time for the two of them to agree on something!

“That’s not necessary,” Toshirou insisted roughly. “This isn’t your responsibility; it’s mine.”

“Don’t worry, Hijikata-san, I don’t feel any personal responsibility for any of this,” Sougo said, deadpan. “I’m not here to shoot Danna. At the end of the day, I’ll just shoot you, regardless of the outcome.”

Suddenly, Toshirou felt a bullet graze his cheek.

“Weren’t you going to wait for the end of the day?” he shouted, once again gripping the hilt of his sword.

“Oops, my finger slipped,” Sougo said, brazenly firing another shot.

Toshirou ducked and readied a swipe. He was going to cut that little asshole’s gun in two and then he would hit him in the head with both pieces.

“Quiet, everyone!” Shimura commanded from where she was looking over the side of the building. “It’s her!”

Silently, begrudgingly, agreeing to a temporary ceasefire with Sougo, Toshirou sheathed his sword and snatched up his binoculars, while the team of 13s peered into their sniper-rifle sights, and everyone looked at the woman walking through the crowd on the street four stories below them. Shimura was right. She was definitely the woman in the picture the Hyakka leader had given him when they finalized the contract. It was a picture he was now severely regretting handing over to Yamazaki for safe keeping, because safe keeping now apparently meant showing to everyone, according to the Shinsengumi’s top spy.

The picture was of that Muneno Tanima woman smiling ear-to-ear with an expression strikingly similar to what Toshirou could remember of Oedo TV’s bright and cheerful Ketsuno Ana. Seeing her occasionally on the news, Toshirou had never understood the appeal. He had mentioned that to the Yorozuya once, who had scowled in genuine disgust and asked, “Who replaced your soul with a black hole and forgot to tell me?”

Only half-listening to the five minute lecture on Ketsuno’s universal goodness that had followed that statement – something about heart and determination and kindness and spirit bombs –, Toshirou learned one thing: the Yorozuya definitely had a type. And the heads of Yoshiwara really knew what they were doing, because Muneno Tanima fit that type to a T.

Her light brown hair was a bit longer than her famous counterpart’s, tied back in a casual bun with a few stray locks that grazed the shoulders of a kimono full of warm blues and yellows. She walked with a bubbly confidence, striding directly toward the pachinko parlor the Yorozuya had been lazing about inside of for the last two hours. A few meters away from her goal, the woman reached up to seemingly brush something off her chest. As soon as she did, Toshirou’s radio crackled to life.

“This is Muneno. I’m in position,” she whispered.

“Roger that. You’re good to go,” Toshirou replied into the radio – to which Muneno lightly tapped the ear containing her own concealed earbud and nodded.

They had agreed on two-way communication, so he could hear proof of her seducing the Yorozuya, as well as provide backup if things got messy, which they often did whenever this guy was involved. For now, however, Toshirou was content to take the back seat and let Muneno do what he was paying her to do: catch the Yorozuya in his pathetic game!

But first she would have to get his attention.

As she walked up to the entryway doors, they slid open to reveal the front few rows of flashing and blinking machines cloistered within. The Yorozuya was picking his nose and using the same boogered hand to pull down the lever at a machine two seats away from the front, shoulder to shoulder with that washed-up ex-government official he shared a drink with from time to time. Hagekawa, was it? Not that it mattered.

Muneno let out a tasteful shriek as she tripped dramatically over the threshold, collapsing to the ground halfway in and halfway out of the parlor in such a way that prevented the automatic doors from closing, thus giving Toshirou and the three 13s a clear view of the scene.

“Oh!” Muneno’s yelp was audible through the radio. “I think I twisted my ankle. I can’t get up.”

The clangs and jingles coming from the pachinko machines smothered the awkward silence that followed.

“He’s not even looking,” Kondo commented.

“Well, getting caught in an automatic door is a stupid gimmick. No one is going to believe she’s actually hurt,” Sougo said.

“Hey,” Toshirou growled back defensively, “that’s not true. I see people get injured in them all the time. Those doors are dangerous.”

Sougo didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. This was a foolproof plan. It didn’t matter that Toshirou was the one who had thought of it or anything. It was just objectively a damn good plan.

“Can someone help me?” Muneno spoke up again.

This time, the Yorozuya did actually glance over at her. As they met eyes, the woman wiggled a bit on the floor in a way Toshirou assumed must have been an attempt at something seductive. Considering the way Kondo’s nostrils flared as she did so, it was a damn good attempt.

After a moment of staring, the Yorozuya tapped the shoulder of the guy – Hatamapa? – sitting next to him and whispered something into his ear. That… Hedalama turned around and immediately rushed over to Muneno.

“Hey? Miss? Are you okay?” the idiot’s voice came in over the radio.

 _Not you!_ Toshirou gritted his teeth.

“Um, I, no. I hurt my ankle,” Muneno managed. “Can your friend help? He looks… nice.”

If the guy had turned around to look at his so-called friend in that moment, he would have caught the Yorozuya right in the middle of stealing a good portion of his pachinko balls.

Instead, waving off the insult like a natural, Hupakaka continued to face forward as he replied, “Don’t worry. I’m stronger than I look. I can carry you.”

“This is going nowhere,” Toshirou snapped. “Why won’t he take the bait?”

“But the Yorozuya’s Danna did take the bait, Hijikata-san,” Sougo said. “The bait of free pachinko balls.”

Toshirou could arrest him for that. He was getting the strongest urge to just throw the asshole in jail and get on with his life.

“Gin-san isn’t taking the bait, because the stakes aren’t high enough,” Shimura said suddenly, taking careful aim and firing her gun.

The bullet whizzed from the top of one building to the bottom of another, crashing into the frame of the automatic door less than a meter away from Muneno’s head.

Toshirou didn’t need the radio to hear her shriek. It traveled naturally through the air, four stories up to the top of the building where three men stood staring at a woman as she loaded another magazine into her rifle.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shouted.

“Raising the stakes,” Shimura said, eyes gleaming. “Are you going to help me or what?”

“She’s right, Toshi,” Kondo said after a moment, readying his own gun. “We have to force his hand.”

There were a dozen other ways they could have tried to force the Yorozuya’s hand before opening fire on a crowded street! Did this guy suddenly forget that he was in charge of a police force?

“Before you do anything stupid, think of the Shinsengumi,” Toshirou said earnestly.

Perhaps reminding Kondo of his position – his identity as a leader – might be enough to snap him out of whatever this was.

Unlike Sougo, who was already on his fifth bullet, Kondo did pause. Staring right into Toshirou’s eyes, expression as strong and true as it had ever been, he said, “I am thinking of the Shinsengumi, which is why I have to do this.”

With these words, Gorilla 13 joined his team and took aim.

 

* * *

 

“But- but- I- I- yes, but I- yes,” Kondo said desperately into the phone. “You were the one who said we could support Toshi!”

A pause. Silence. A waitress came by their table with four glasses of tea.

“Not like that? Alright. Okay. Yes.”

Ending the call, Kondo looked at the group, chewing his lip.

“Sougo and I have to go see Pops Matsudaira now and explain how we’re not terrorists,” he announced. “Don’t worry, we’ll probably still have our jobs at the end of the meeting.”

“I’m coming too,” Toshirou said.

The state of the Shinsengumi was far more important than the plan, and trusting Kondo and Sougo to handle something that required diplomacy was like betting on a woodpecker to win at Jenga.

However, when he moved to get up, Kondo pushed him bodily back down into the booth.

“No, Toshi,” Kondo said. “Matsudaira specifically ordered you to stay here. He said he wanted you to talk care of the rest. I’m not sure how I could tell, but I’m pretty sure he was winking when he said that too.”

That stupid old fart! Why was he winking all the time these days?

“I’m coming anyway,” Toshirou insisted.

“You started this; end it on your terms,” Kondo replied with finality. “We’ll handle everything else. I promise.”

Toshirou sighed in resignation. There was no arguing with that.

“Okay,” he said. “Try not to get shot.”

Kondo grinned and grabbed Toshirou’s bicep, squeezing once, before letting go.

“Otae-san,” he asked, “will you stay with him?”

“I don’t need any--”

“Of course,” Shimura interrupted, serene. “Unlike you, I can shoot guns all I like without worry of consequences.”

That didn’t sound right, but no one at the table was willing to question it.

“Bye, Hijikata-san. I’ll have to kill you later, I guess,” Sougo said, following Kondo out the door, leaving Toshirou and Shimura alone in the coffee shop.

The radio lay between them on the table, revealing a conversation occurring three booths over between the Yorozuya and Muneno Tanima.

“I really can’t thank you enough for saving me,” the woman was saying.

“This cake works,” the Yorozuya mumbled through what sounded like a damn big mouthful.

“Have all the cake you want! My treat,” Muneno enthused with warmth.

Easy for her to say when it wasn’t her money on the line! Beyond the viciously high hourly rate for her services, any expenses involved in the outing were also going to come out of Toshirou’s fast-dwindling savings. At this rate, he was going to have ask Yamazaki where to buy anpan wholesale.

But it would all be worth it if the plan went, well, _according to plan_. As much as the 13s’ bullet spree had been an abject disaster, one good thing seemed to have come out of it. While he had been too distracted with trying to reign the snipers in to witness it happening, the Yorozuya and Muneno had come out the other side of it all on speaking terms. Terms that Muneno had used to get him into a restaurant with sugar, which was a step in the right direction.

“I don’t know where I’d be if you hadn’t been there,” Muneno’s voice came through the radio.

“Mm,” was the Yorozuya’s non-committal reply.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been so afraid in my life,” she continued.

“Mm,” the Yorozuya said again, munching loudly.

Toshirou was trying his damnedest to resist the urge to stomp over to their table, snatch the cake away, and scream, _‘Talk to her, you dumbass!’_

Muneno was the kind of girl that was supposed to make a guy like him puff out his chest and brag about making a lot more money than he actually did. The Yorozuya needed to stop thinking with his stomach and let the brain farther down the stairs take priority.

As if Toshirou’s own brain waves had set things in motion, the clink of the Yorozuya putting his fork down came through the radio, followed by him saying, “Once you get past the smell, you come to understand that he’s not so bad.”

Toshirou and Shimura shared a look of pure confusion. What the hell was the Yorozuya going on about?

“Really?” Muneno asked. “You mean he smells like that all the time?”

“Well, sure,” the Yorozuya replied. “It’s the patented old man smell. L’eau de Madao: a mixture of some old beer, a bit of trash, disappointment, and that weird odor wafting from the back corner of that shady convenience store.”

Sucking in a breath, Muneno replied, “Yes, that’s it.”

After a stifled sob, she repeated, “That’s exactly it.”

So Muneno was thanking the Yorozuya for saving her life from… What was it again? Hadapala? Why was that dumpy guy being considered a stronger trauma than a shower of bullets?

Shimura’s smile grew brittle.

“She should try working in a cabaret club one of these days,” she said roughly. “L’eau de Madao becomes everything you breathe in, and you’ve got to do it with a smile. Did you really hire this weakling from Yoshiwara? Is she new?” 

“Playing the weakling could just be her strategy,” Toshirou suggested.

It was a pretty weird play, but she hadn’t struck out yet. He was willing to wait and see where it all went.

“Well, it’s a stupid strategy,” Shimura declared. “Does she really think Gin-san will fall for something like that? It has to be believable. Like gunshots!”

Toshirou was getting the feeling that Shimura’s sudden animosity toward Muneno had less to do with her apparent weaknesses and more to do with her choosing to ignore Shimura’s bullets. Shimura’s plan was passed over for a Madao, and according to the rigid stiffness of her posture and the casual threat of violence sparking in her eyes, she was currently feeling the sting of that slap.

Digging a cigarette out of his pack, he said, “It’s not important,” in the hopes that he could simply will that statement into objective existence.

“We’ll see about that,” Shimura said ominously.

Both of them turned their attentions back to the radio in time to hear the Yorozuya saying, “Hey, calm down. You’re safe now.”

“Yes,” Muneno sniffed. “I know, but I just… I’m sorry, I just can’t forget that moment when he got close to me. You remember. It was the time when he was diving out of the way of that stray bullet... his stubble grazed my shoulder and I still feel ill!”

Was that the time when she had screamed after the first gunshot back at the pachinko parlor? It was because of stubble?

A dark, insidious aura was emanating from the woman on the other side of the table.

Her smile near wide enough to crack her own face, Shimura said, “So she’s using my bullets as background for her pathetic story?”

“Oi, calm down,” Toshirou attempted.

“Don’t you worry, Hijikata-san, I am calm,” Shimura said like an icy wind blowing through the desert. Pulling out her sniper rifle, she declared, “I just think this girl needs to learn what a bullet from the background really means.”

Scrambling out of his seat in a rush to grab Shimura’s gun away before she committed murder in broad daylight, Toshirou almost didn’t hear Muneno say, “I need the feel of someone else’s skin against mine to wash away my memories of him.”

But he did hear it. So did Shimura. The both of them paused and turned their eyes back to the radio on the table.

Muneno was making her play.

“Is that so?” the Yorozuya said calmly, his tone giving nothing away even when Toshirou found himself surprised with the force of his wish that it would.

“Yes,” Muneno replied, her voice the color of red satin sheets on a bed with a hardy mattress. “And I was hoping that someone could be you.”

Seconds ticked by. Or was it no time at all? Toshirou couldn’t tell. His body was flooding with adrenaline he would normally use to cut down a group of Joui, to save Kondo’s life, to fight for or against something, but right now there was nothing to do, there was nothing to fight. Electricity darted across his skin, his muscles tensing, eyes dilating, all part of a heavily instinctual response to a threat against a feeling he hadn’t realized had already settled deep into the very marrow of his bones.

And that was when Gintoki said, “Okay.”

As suddenly as it came, the adrenaline washed away. His body relaxed, and Toshirou was calm.

Shimura swiftly raised her gun once again, but it was pointed just a shade to the left of where she had been aiming before.

“Don’t,” Toshirou said.

“He doesn’t get to do that.”

“Yes, he does. That was the whole point of this.”

“No. The point was for him to prove to you that–”

Toshirou let out a wry chuckle in a small cloud of smoke.

“That he what?”

After a heavy moment, Shimura put her gun down on the table with the gentleness and care one would when setting an offering at a gravesite. She seemed to stare down at the weapon, but the tilt of her neck had her bangs covering her eyes from Toshirou’s view, so he couldn’t be sure.

“I don’t know what you were expecting,” he said, somewhat surprised by her apparent investment in all of this.

He had assumed her motives had been similar to Sougo’s, who had only been looking to get a little entertainment out of a ridiculous situation. Maybe she had just ended up on the wrong side of a betting pool.

“Muneno to Hijikata,” a voice crackled through the radio.

“This is Hijikata,” he responded automatically. “Good work.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I told Sakata-san I was going to the washroom so I could ask a favor.”

“What favor?”

“I know you just wanted the verbal confirmation, but I really do like him. I want to go through with it. Free of charge, of course,” she added.

Of course. If she wanted payment, Toshirou would have given her the money then quickly arrested her for prostitution.

“Do what you want. It’s no concern of mine,” Toshirou said, and turned off the radio.

The table fell to silence. Toshirou smoked one cigarette, then another.

At long last, he had managed to slice apart the tracks heading toward Feelings for Yorozuya Station, so the trains would have nowhere to go. The distraction was gone, and he could now devote himself fully to his work.

It didn’t matter that the process of freeing himself had been more painful than he had thought it would be. It didn’t matter that the only other wounds of similar sharpness, form, and depth he could recall had to do with Mitsuba and his older brother. It didn’t matter, because the pain in his chest would disappear with time. He may not have come out of the battle unscathed, but he did win, and that was what mattered.

Luckily, he had more than enough work to keep his mind focused on different targets. Soon he would return to the barracks and submerge himself in his duties, but he wanted to sit for just a little bit longer. Just a bit longer, and then he would leave.

“He must not know,” Shimura said finally.

It had been so long since either of them had said anything that Toshirou thought he imagined her words at first.

“He would never have done this if he knew,” she said firmly. “I know him. I know Sakata Gintoki would never do something like that. To anyone."

He didn’t like what the woman was implying.

“Stop spouting nonsense,” he said. “I’m going.”

Shimura grabbed him by the sleeve of his kimono as he stood.

“Hijikata-san, I’m –” she began softly, before pursing her lips together and putting on a decisive smile as she noticeably changed gears, saying, “I hope you know I will be giving Gin-san a punch in the face next time I see him.”

He wasn’t going to complain. The idiot was out of his life and would be getting a broken head soon courtesy of this violent woman. Things were good.

With not-quite-a-smile on his face, Toshirou exited the coffee shop only to immediately be greeted with proof of how very not good things actually were.

“If it isn’t my scheming asshole of a cop,” the Yorozuya said from where he was leaning against the wall right outside the entrance. “Yo.”

Toshirou stared at him.

The Yorozuya stared back, lips morphing into an aggressive grin – almost as if he understood exactly how he had given Toshirou a short, tantalizing illusion of victory only to snatch it all away just when he was getting used to the feeling. The sadist.

“You knew,” he accused.

“Hm?” The Yorozuya dug around in his ear, dismissively skeptical. “Were you trying to keep it a secret? Were you all running around on top of a building screaming and firing bullets and trying to keep it a secret? Was I supposed to wear my sensory deprivation helmet to keep myself in the dark?”

Toshirou flushed red. The Yorozuya… he had figured it out right from the start. All the planning, all the money, everything had all amounted to a big stinking pile of nothing just because this stupid fucker had enough general awareness to pinpoint the group of sniper 13s on the roof.

The trains he thought he had derailed were already steadily chugging along once again, whistling phrases like ‘ _He didn’t go through with it!’_ and _‘You still can’t say for sure that he doesn’t – ’_

“So what?” Toshirou snorted roughly, deciding to push the matter. Perhaps he could still salvage this. “So you knew. Still doesn’t explain why you didn’t take what was offered up to you on a silver platter.”

“I did take it,” the Yorozuya replied. “It wasn’t very good cake though, and not really worth all the fuss to get it. You know I prefer parfaits.”

“NOT THE CAKE! THE WOMAN!” Toshirou bellowed.

“You’re so noisy. This is why you can’t do subterfuge,” the Yorozuya said as he pushed himself off the wall and started to make his way down the street, Toshirou immediately falling in step beside him.

Lately, this was something they would often do if they encountered each other at some point in the day. Perhaps Sougo or some other little shit made it happen, or Toshirou was ending his patrol and the Yorozuya was ending one of his jobs, or Toshirou was making his way around town on his day off and the Yorozuya was on one of his endless days off. Whatever the combination, it happened frequently enough, and in the middle of whatever conversation or argument that started between them when it did, the Yorozuya would simply start walking as he continued it, forcing Toshirou to keep the pace if he wanted to get his own words heard.

They would end up at a bar or the riverside or the Yorozuya’s home or a cheap restaurant or, in one case, the bowling team regionals that Toshirou had told China a week earlier he wouldn’t be able to make, goddammit.

He figured out the pattern after the first few weeks of these walking conversations, and was immediately irritated.

“I’m not a dog on a leash,” he had snapped.

Looking at him, bemused, the Yorozuya had replied, “No, but you are a dog off of one.”

There were some times when Toshirou simply couldn’t follow along. Maybe he was on his way to a meeting, or he was running low on mayonnaise. Whatever the reason, he would simply stay put as the Yorozuya walked away, and, without turning around, the Yorozuya would continue forward, raising a hand in farewell.

Tonight, though, Toshirou had the time. He had made the time, weeks in advance, to clear his entire schedule on this day. He was not about to waste what was left.

Walking side-by-side, the two of them fell into an uncharacteristically long period of silence.

He had no more plans to fall back on, but maybe that was for the best. Maybe where careful planning failed, swift instinct could succeed.

Finally, Toshirou said the first thing that came to mind: “You should have slept with her.”

“So you admit it. You wanted to make me into a cheater,” the Yorozuya said, eyes strangely wide and sharp in the fading twilight.

Toshirou couldn’t help but remember the last time he saw those eyes – focused, near unblinking, even through a kiss.

“It’s not cheating if you were never committed in the first place,” he insisted through a general unease. “She is someone you could actually want. Don’t be stubborn.”

“This again? If you want to end things, you have to end them. I’m not going to do that for you, my lazyass mayora,” the Yorozuya said, a yawn once again reverting his features back to their bland, unassuming, fish-eyed factory reset as he repeated words from an argument they must have had dozens of times before.

Every one of those times, Toshirou had gotten just a bit more irritated. When the Yorozuya kept pinning the blame on Toshirou instead of owning up to the fact that he was only doing all of this to be a pain in the ass, the fire in the pit of his stomach burned a few degrees hotter. The cauldron was boiling now.

“But one thing I will do,” the Yorozuya continued, “is show you how very committed I am to this magical thing we’re sharing.”

He stopped in front of the most garish trash heap of a love hotel Toshirou had ever seen, and slapped the wall with a squelching sound. His palm came away damp and glistening even though it hadn’t rained around here in weeks.

“Since you seem to really want me to do the do with someone tonight, I will,” the Yorozuya declared. “As long as it happens to be with the person I’m dating. No problem there, right?”

The idiot finally did it. He finally played the trump card.

Ever since that night when the Yorozuya had ripped up Toshirou’s uniform, the two of them had occasionally visited the first and second bases, and even had a little dabble with third. However, in spite of all the action across the bases, no one had ever scored a home run. For good damn reason.

Toshirou wasn’t about to do that with someone who was only there because they weren’t capable of backing down. That was just stupid. Things were already bad enough as it was.

Last month, when he had gone down to Snack Smile to drag Kondo to a meeting and away from Shimura, one of the drunker hostesses had swayed up to kiss him on the side of his mouth. His only train of thought had been one that cataloged all the ways how it wasn’t a kiss from the Yorozuya.

That was how his mind worked. He focused so deeply on certain people that the rest of the world came to him as a comparison. In the case of Kondo, it was an effective state of affiars, and manifested as Toshirou’s rather single-minded devotion and loyalty to the Shinsengumi. In the case of Mitsuba, it was tolerable, because, while the memories still cut, their relationship had mostly been potential unfulfilled. However, in the case of Gintoki, things were fast approaching unbearable.

The more he was given, the worse it got. He needed to hear the Yorozuya say this wasn’t real, and he needed to hear it now. It was time to use his own trump card.

“I’m no loose man,” Toshirou said in response to the Yorozuya’s leering proposition. “If you want to do that, you’re going to have to tie the knot with me first.”

...

Bullseye.

The Yorozuya was frozen in place, the only movement being the viscous liquid he had gathered from the wall sliding down his hand and dripping onto the ground with a resounding plop. He looked down at the puddle of goo and then looked back up at Toshirou, lips twitching.

“Hm? It’s almost as if you just said –”

“You heard me fine,” Toshirou said, reveling in the feeling of finally have the upper hand. “Either you marry me, or find someone like Muneno to take to a place like this.”

“Hey! How did those suddenly become my only two options?” the Yorozuya snapped, running a hand through his perm, which, incidentally, also happened to be the hand he had put on the wall. The curls his hand touched came out of the interaction looking well and truly gelled.

Suddenly reminded of the night when he had gotten himself into this whole mess, that time he had confessed to the Yorozuya strongly enough to turn him mute, Toshirou couldn’t help but laugh.

“Shut up,” the Yorozuya growled and kicked him roughly in the shin. “What right do you have to laugh? Unless you’ve been carrying some big secret around, you haven’t been married before, hm?”

“That’s right,” Toshirou said, still smiling as he moved to light himself another cigarette.

“If your no nuptial, no nookie thing has always been a policy, then this is you telling me that you’re a cherry boy,” the Yorozuya announced with glee. “A full grown, adult cherry boy.”

Toshirou’s finger slipped. He fumbled with his lighter, and ultimately dropped it onto the floor right into the pile of goo that had slid off the Yorozuya’s hand only moments before.

Dammit. Maybe he didn’t think this plan through. If he told the fucker he was dead wrong then the Yorozuya would know he was lying about his sex policy. If he agreed, he was a cherry boy.

His pride was screaming at him to find another way. If this got back to his men at the barracks…!

But he was so damn close to victory here. This was the closest he had ever been. He had to take this chance!

“It’s true!” Toshirou shouted louder than was probably necessary. “I’m a cherry boy! What’s it to you?”

He felt far too many gazes settle on him, which is when he remembered that he was having this conversation in an open thoroughfare. These people better not have big mouths. They better keep it to themselves!

After a moment, the Yorozuya’s taunting smirk faded, and he sighed.

“Alright, already,” he said with something approaching delicacy. “I get it. Let’s just go to a bar instead.”

Toshirou agreed easily enough. He could tell that the Yorozuya was just one or two nudges away from folding – from admitting that he couldn’t actually go through with anything. A little booze would get him there! A few drinks, just a few more and –

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fuck. His head hurt.

Toshirou cracked his eyes open and quickly slammed off the blaring, cranium-shattering alarm next to his futon. Unfortunately, the pounding in his head only intensified when he realized he was going to have lead the team debrief in an hour. Why the hell had he let himself get so plastered the night before he was on duty?

“Yamazaki,” he muttered through a dry heave, causing the shadowed figure on the other side of his sliding door to twitch.

“Yes, Vice-Commander?” Yamazaki replied.

“Go commit seppuku,” he said.

Yamazaki should have reminded him not to get drunk last night. This was his fault.

“Of course,” Yamazaki agreed, before saying, “but first I have a message for you from the Commander.”

Through the fog of his hangover, he considered what Kondo could possibly want from him this early. If it had been an emergency, Yamazaki would have woken him up, but instead he had waited for Toshirou to stir before saying his piece. It was not an emergency, but it was something urgent enough to have Yamazaki stationed outside of his door at five in the morning.

Chasing the frog out of his throat, Toshirou coughed once and then replied, “Go ahead.”

“The Commander heard from Shimura Tae what happened. He wants you to take today off.”

Ah. That’s right. Yesterday, he had gone through with his plan to make the Yorozuya admit to his lies. Near the end of that circus, Shimura had heard the Yorozuya agree to Muneno’s proposition, and must have spread the word that Toshirou was the poor victim of the merciless, cheating Odd Jobs boss.

If only that were the case! Instead, the idiot had seen through the plot, had dared Toshirou to have sex with him, and then he’d dared the Yorozuya to marry him in retaliation, and then they went for drinks and…

Toshirou really couldn’t remember the rest, but he had the feeling he was winning. Or almost winning. That would come later this week when he could corner the Yorozuya and finish this. First, however, came work.

“I’m not taking the day off,” he said.

“In the case that you said that, the Commander told me to tell you that he would then take a day off in your place. With his sniper rifle. In Kabukicho,” Yamazaki said. “Also, I will be taking the day off too. With my badminton racket. Inside Danna’s house.”

This was starting to sound like a terrible game of Clue where the murderers simply announced all their intentions going in.

“Nobody’s taking the day off today,” Toshirou snapped, pulling rank over Kondo’s theatrics. “I’d better see everyone in the meeting hall in 45 minutes, or I’m buying my own goddamn sniper rifle!”

 

* * *

 

The weirdest one of them all had to be Sougo. Toshirou had already been expecting the irritating mixture of awkward and sympathetic looks from the rest of his men, and a watery-eyed one from Kondo, but Sougo brought him coffee before the start of the meeting. And it wasn’t laced with anything, as far as he could tell.

Was he supposed to thank him? Toshirou wasn’t sure.

Still mulling over exactly what he was going to say to a Shinsengumi far far too invested in a bundle of lies about his personal life, it took him a second more than it might have otherwise to notice the man in Mimawarigumi uniform making his way to the front of the hall, and to Toshirou.

The man stopped in front of him, handing over a white, plain envelope.

“Your new identification card, sir,” he said.

What?

“Why am I getting a new ID?”

“Standard procedure, sir,” the man replied, and made his leave as quickly as he came.

Where most of the attention of the room had been subtly fixed in his direction before this interruption, it was now doubly so. A majority of the men were openly staring at this point.

Ignoring the audience, Toshirou opened the envelope and took out the ID card. It was almost identical to his previous one, showing his picture and his job as Vice-Commander of the Shinsengumi. That was all the same, but there was one difference. One rather big difference.

All of a sudden, he recalled another memory from the night before. Him and the Yorozuya, they were on their fifth round. Toshirou was smiling so much his cheeks hurt, feeling more and more sure of this night – tonight – being his opportunity to finish it all. This was his game. This was checkmate.

“If you’re not going to marry me after all this time, it sounds like you aren’t really serious about any of this,” he declared, giddy. “You should say that and let everyone move on.”

He was looking forward to that. He was looking forward to being free. He was looking forward to forgetting. It was exciting! It was empowering! He felt stronger already!

“Marriage. Marriage. Marriage,” the Yorozuya muttered, waving his cup about with each repetition. “Is that all you can say? Is that all a cherry boy like you can say?”

“Oi, Yorozuya,” Toshirou said, barely able to contain his laughter. “Do you take this cherry boy or not?”

He rested his head in his arms, snickering, until the Yorozuya roughly nudged him.

“Alright! Fine,” the Yorozuya mumbled, mouth and expression carefully blocked from Toshirou’s view with his cup-holding hand. “You’ll be happy if I become Mr. Cherry-Boy, is that it?”

Spitting right onto the Yorozuya’s nearest arm, Toshirou said, “Like you’re actually gonna do it.”

“Maybe I am!”

“Maybe you will!”

After a moment of confused silence, where neither of them were quite sure what to do next, they moved as one, clinking their glasses together and downing the sake within.

Toshirou couldn’t remember what happened after that, but he didn’t need to. His new ID told the story. Right there on the card, his first name was written as TOSHIROU, with his last name printed as…

 

CHERRY-BOY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As some commenters on this fic may already know, I’ve been somewhat vague about my reasoning for using the name Toshirou instead of Hijikata in Toshi’s narration, when Hijikata is much more frequently used in the fanfic community.  
> Well, now that this chapter is out, it might be a little easier to figure out that mystery!


	8. Chapter 8

Cherry-Boy Toshirou had years of experience acting cool and composed in the most stressful situations. He would formulate critical strategies on the fly for his men in the midst of battle; he would guard individuals so high profile that one hair missing on their head at the end of the job would mean his certain death; he would bowl a clean strike with a shikigami and a terrible green monster standing right behind him.

This was the only reason he was able to glance at his new ID and then slip it casually into his wallet in his pocket like it was nothing significant. He was used to being under pressure. He thrived in situations like this. Nobody would be able to look at him and notice anything was wrong.

“Toshi, what’s wrong? You’re sweating,” Kondo said.

“What? No,” Toshirou exclaimed, waving his hands furiously. “I’m doing a juice cleanse. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That doesn’t sound right. You hate juice,” Sougo said, somehow now directly beside him. “What was on the ID, Hijikata?”

Not Hijikata! That was the point – the point that no one but him needed to know about!

“You know what? I think I will take you up on that offer of a day off, Kondo-san,” Toshirou said hurriedly. “I guess the cleanse is hitting me harder than I thought it would.”

After studying him for a moment, Kondo nodded.

“Of course. Get some rest. I’ll take the lead today.”

Wasting no time, Toshirou sped toward the exit. He was going to fix this fast, and no one had to know it ever happened in the first place. If his ID had been changed overnight, getting it changed back in a day shouldn’t be so hard…

Wait a second.

He patted down his pockets frantically. Where _was_ the ID?

“Looking for something?” Sougo asked, tossing Toshirou’s wallet from one hand to the other.

“SOUGO!”

It was too late. Sougo already had the card out, eyes scanning the contents. Whatever grains of sympathy or concern had led him to hand Toshirou that coffee just a few minutes earlier seemed to evaporate on contact with a burning, all-consuming glee.

“Oh no. I’m so sorry,” Sougo announced loudly enough for the whole room to hear every word. “I got your name wrong. How rude of me. It’s not Hijikata anymore, it’s–”

 

* * *

 

Cherry-Boy Toshirou grabbed the railing at the foot of the stairs leading up to the Yorozuya’s place, catching his breath after having sprinted full-speed from the barracks to here. He may have just broken some land speed records, but that wasn’t important right now. Top priority was digging himself out of this stinking pile of dog shit, and the origin of that dog shit lay where it usually did in this town: Yorozuya Gin-chan.

He started to climb the stairs only to bump into another visitor already making their way back down – something he hadn’t been expecting at not-quite seven in the morning.

“Oh, Hijikata-san,” the Shimura woman exclaimed.

Not feeling any compelling reason to correct her, he simply tilted his head in greeting.

“Is the Yorozuya in?”

“Gin-san? Most of him still should be, yes,” she replied, smiling.

What the hell did that mean!

Considering these words, Toshirou remembered the last words Shimura had said to him before he left the coffee shop the day before – words of clean, pristine, violent intent. At that point, she had just heard what sounded like the Yorozuya agreeing to sleep with Muneno, but she didn’t hear what happened after. She didn’t hear how it had all been another stupid lie.

Maybe he should clear up any misconceptions she might still have, but, then again, he had the feeling it might be a little too late for that.

Choosing to simply walk past her, Toshirou didn’t waste time knocking. He slid open the unlocked door and made his way through the darkened entryway hall of the Yorozuya HQ. The door to Gintoki’s bedroom was flung haphazardly ajar, and the man himself was twitching on the floor, only his pajama clad ass and legs visible, with the rest of him hanging out of a newly-formed hole in his bedroom wall facing the alleyway below.

Dragging him back into his room by the ankle, Toshirou flipped him over to find more of a giant bruise than anything resembling a face. Considering the glazed look in his eyes, the Yorozuya was completely out for the count.

If he had come in a better mood, Toshirou might have taken pity on him, but now he just had to think back to the howls of laughter he had heard as he left the barracks and felt completely justified in kicking the idiot hard in the stomach.

With a rough cough, the sentient bruise groaned its way back to life.

“Guh?” it mumbled. “Aghuh.”

This could take a while. Running low on patience, Toshirou chose to abandon the writhing pile of limbs on the floor, and went over to the Yorozuya’s desk in the main room. Searching the guy’s place unannounced wouldn’t be a problem if what he thought had happened had actually happened. Spouses didn’t need search warrants.

The second drawer he opened contained Gintoki’s family seal. He held up the stamp, hoping to find the kanji for SAKATA. Instead, it was in the shape of a pair of cherries.

Paling, he opened another drawer and found a wallet. Inside was mostly empty, except for three hundred yen coins, a buy two get one free coupon for packs of toilet paper, and a provisional driver’s license. This flimsy paper license indicated it was only to be used until a new official license was sent out to replace it within two weeks. The user of the license was written as first name Gintoki, last name Cherry-Boy.

“Has no one ever told you to keep your paws off what doesn’t belong to you?” Cherry-Boy Gintoki said, looking somewhat more human and less like a twitching mass of wounded flesh than he had moments before. He ambled toward Toshirou, snatching back his wallet. “If they haven’t, I can. I can say it all damn day.”

Toshirou opened his mouth then closed it again. He was going to have to handle this… carefully.

While he could think of few worse fates than walking the Earth as Cherry-Boy for the rest of his life, he needed the Yorozuya to think he was okay with this. He needed to appear like this was all fine – no, _better_ than fine. Toshirou needed to come off acting like this whole thing was great, while also getting the Yorozuya to admit that _he_ was the one who couldn’t handle being Cherry-Boy-ed to Toshirou – which, of course he couldn’t. Who in their right mind would want something like this? Toshirou just needed to coax the truth out of him, and then he could get his name and the rest of his life back.

“Sorry, it’s just that some of yesterday is a little fuzzy,” he said with a smile. “I had to check and see if it actually happened.”

The Yorozuya squinted at him in a way that confirmed for Toshirou that he wasn’t the only one that drank way too much last night. That idiot didn’t remember either.

After a moment, the Yorozuya opened his own wallet. He stared at the provisional license in the heaviest silence known to man.

“Is something wrong,” Toshirou asked, pausing significantly before adding, “honey?”

Gently, ever so gently, the Yorozuya slid the cursed paper back into this wallet, and placed the wallet on the table.

“So, you and I...”

“Yes.”

“We tied our cherry stems into a knot last night?”

That was one way to put it.

Placing a hand on a shoulder he could feel was physically vibrating with pent up emotional energy, Toshirou said, “You seem uncomfortable. If this is a problem for you, I’m sure we could always untie the cherry stems pretty quickly. If it’s a problem for _you_ ,” he repeated.

Just say it! Say it, Yorozuya, and this could all be over!

Taking a deep breath, the Yorozuya grabbed the hand on his shoulder, threaded their fingers together and said, “Do I look uncomfortable? I’m not uncomfortable. I’m just so happy this has finally happened. I’m overwhelmed with happiness.”

YO RO ZU YA!!!!

“Are you sure?” Toshirou tried through grinning, gritted teeth. “Because you actually seem really uncomfortable.”

“I’m not sure why you would think that,” the Yorozuya said, his own teeth bared into a violent mockery of joy. “Maybe you’re projecting. Maybe you’re the one that’s actually uncomfortable with this. If that’s the case, don’t worry, you can say it. You can admit it. I promise I won’t be mad. Go on. Say it. Say it. Say it. _Say it_.”

The Yorozuya’s words gradually seemed to be evolving from request to urgent incantation.

“No no no,” Toshirou replied with the only option available to him. “This is what I’ve always wanted. Ever since I was a little boy, I dreamed of being Mr. Cherry-Boy. I wrote about it every night in the journal I kept beneath my futon. Unfortunately, someone threw a grenade on that futon one day, so the journal exploded – otherwise I would have shown them to you. My writings. My Cherry-Boy writings. But I don’t need those writings anymore now that I have the real thing. Unless…” Toshirou trailed off meaningfully.

_Here is your opening, you fucker. Take it!_

“No no no,” the Yorozuya replied in earnest. “There is no unless. This is what I’ve always wanted too. Do you remember our 8th anime opening? With Light Infection playing?”

“Yeah,” Toshirou replied slowly, not entirely sure where the Yorozuya was going with this. “I was smoking in that one.”

Well, he had been.

“Who cares about you?” the Yorozuya said, as he took a marker to a stack of animation frames, scribbling rapidly. “The opening began by showing me as a child sitting around corpses as the crows flew. It’s going to be a future plot point where they reveal what I was thinking about at that time, and I can spoil it for you now. Take a look.”

The Yorozuya handed him three pages, which Toshirou summarily flipped through.

 

 

Image 1 description: Daytime. A young Gintoki covered in dirt and holding a sword looks toward the sky and thinks, “This sucks.”

 

Image 2 description: Sunset. A young Gintoki covered in dirt and holding a sword looks toward the sky and thinks, “It’s terrible.”

 

Image 3 description: Sunset. Gintoki holds out his sword. He is a mere silhouette within a field of impaled corpses. He thinks, “I hope the future can be a place where I can become a wonderful Mr Cherry-Boy.”

 

Toshirou took a moment.

“Wow,” he finally uttered, deadpan. “It looks like we shared the same dream as children.”

“It does seem that way,” the Yorozuya said, spreading out his arms in a grand gesture. “And now look at us both. Living that very dream. Together.”

“As Cherry-Boys,” Toshirou agreed with a smile – even as a not-insignificant part of himself was screaming, begging one of his own arms to just wind back and punch the Yorozuya straight into the stratosphere.

“As Cherry-Boys,” the Yorozuya repeated, his voice strangely stilted.

“Will you two just shut up?” a third voice chimed in from the direction of the closet.

Sliding the door open, China glared at both of them and rubbed an eye.

“Just because you got hitched last night, it doesn’t give you the right to interrupt a lady’s beauty sleep,” she grumbled through a yawn.

The bags under her eyes were big enough to go on their own shopping trips. Why did Gintoki let her get this tired?

“You should have let her sleep, Yorozuya,” Toshirou said.

“Don’t blame this on me! You’re the one that came barging in here tearing my house apart,” the Yorozuya snapped in return.

“Well, if you had just kept quiet about it, we wouldn’t have had a problem, now, would we?” Toshirou retorted.

The Yorozuya gave him a rough push.

“So I’m just supposed to take this police brutality sitting down? You would like that wouldn’t you?”

Toshirou didn’t know why he ever expected this idiot to act like anything other than an unreasonable asshole. He returned the rough push with one of his one.

“You were already brutalized before I got there. Stop whining.”

He got a rougher push back.

“I’ll stop whining when you stop-”

“Can I ask my question now?” China interrupted.

Apparently having made the decision to give up on any more sleep, she had flopped onto the couch, absentmindedly smoothing down a cowlick from within the midst of her bedhead.

“Last night, when I had a question about this stuff you told me to wait until tomorrow,” she continued.

This statement only served to add a dozen more questions to the lake-sized pile of frantic queries Toshirou already had about what had happened over the previous ten hours.

China had been involved in all of this? Was she there when it happened? Just what had she… seen?

Releasing his grip on Toshirou’s shirt collar, an apparently similarly unnerved Yorozuya swallowed and asked, “What’s the question?”

Folding her legs into the seiza position, China braced her hands on her pajama-clad thighs as she looked at Toshirou and Gintoki with an expression of pure determination.

Taking a deep breath, she said, “Since you’re now the Cherry-Boys... can I be the Cherry-Girl? Cherry-Girl Kagura?”

Whatever Toshirou had been expecting, whatever new, wild revelation he had thought might pop out of her mouth, it hadn’t been anywhere close to this.

Leaning toward the Yorozuya, he whispered, “Oi, tell her that last names don’t work like that.”

“And dash her dreams? I don’t think so,” the Yorozuya hissed back. “Look how serious she is.”

Sneaking another glance in her direction, he saw her holding that same formal pose, waiting patiently for an answer. Her eyes were so bright and hopeful, like she had spotted a glistening, new red sign near the bottles of mayo at the supermarket. She wasn’t close enough to see what the sign said yet, but there was a bubbling feeling in her chest telling her it would be good. It would be amazing. It would say something like ‘Brand New Flavor’ or ‘Our Scientists Figured Out How to Pack More Mayo Taste Into Every Droplet, So Eat Your Fucking Heart Out’.

Leaning back toward the Yorozuya, he whispered, “Why is she so invested in this?”

“Well, think about it,” the Yorozuya mumbled. “She’s never had a last name, and now she’s found her shot. Do you have any idea what this could mean?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about identity. I’m talking about what happens when someone searches for the word ‘Kagura’ on the internet.”

Toshirou opened his phone and did just that.

The first result was Kagura from Inuyasha. The second result was Kagura from Naruto. The third result was Kagura from Fairy Tail. The fourth result was a style of dance.

With a dawning, terrible realization, he asked, “Where is she?”

Smiling bitterly, the Yorozuya whispered, “The second page of search results.”

Letting out a whimper as if she had somehow managed to hear his soft words and they had cut hard, China sent her gaze to her knees.

“Is it so wrong that I want a name, a full name, that people could write out and find me to be right there? At the top? Is it so wrong that I don’t want to be Kagura (Gintama)? Why can’t people find me without the show in parenthesis, tied around my neck like a dog collar? Why is my AO3 tag like this?” China cried in growing hysterics.

The Yorozuya rushed to her side and China fell into his arms, trembling. He rubbed her back in soothing circles.

After watching the spectacle for a moment, Toshirou said, “Yeah, but Cherry-Girl though?”

“What? It’s like she’s honoring us. I think it’s nice,” the Yorozuya replied, hand resting on her head as he stared intently at Toshirou out of the corner of his eye. “Unless you do have a problem with us being Cherry-Boys. If that’s the case, you should probably say it before Kagura-chan becomes a Cherry-Girl, or otherwise you would just be being cruel.”

Shit. Now Gintoki was bringing the kid into this.

At this point, Toshirou had two options. For China’s sake, he could admit that he thought Cherry-Boy was a stupid, stupid name. He could tell her that picking a last name was a serious task she should consider carefully, because it would follow her throughout life and would be a large part of how she would be remembered in death. He could tell her that she should think about her character and the legacy she hoped to leave. He could tell her all that for her sake.

Or. He could never ever admit to anything, and, as long as nobody found out he was lying, it would all work out.

“You’re right, Yorozuya. That is nice,” he finally said, getting a disappointed click of the tongue in response.

Cherry-Girl Kagura squirmed out of Cherry-Boy Gintoki’s grasp and lifted up her head, smiling grandly.

“Thanks, Mami 4,” she said.

Grunting his acknowledgment, Toshirou was struck with a feeling he had been experiencing more and more often these days – that everything was spiraling utterly, insanely out of control. He needed to get some of that control back, and, in order to do so, he needed some answers.

“Hey, China,” he said, taking a seat across from her. “How about you tell us your perspective of how things went last night? It was such a special event that I want to hear about it from all angles.”

Settling down next to Toshirou, the Yorozuya hummed noncommittally, flipping open an issue of Jump.

“Sounds boring, but whatever,” he said in a tone that could easily be mistaken for lazy disinterest, but Toshirou was placed at the unique vantage point that allowed him to see that the page the Yorozuya was looking at, with his eyes flitting back and forth like he was casually reading dialogue, was wordless. Instead, there were just two characters staring at each other intently from opposite sides of a ping pong table. Also, the whole Jump was upside down.

Of course the Yorozuya would be invested in hearing what China had to say on this. He probably remembered less of last night than Toshirou.

And of course the Yorozuya would let him do all the social heavy-lifting to get the story out in the open. The lazyass.

“Ignore the idiot,” Toshirou said.

“Well,” China said, considering, “I guess that might be fun. It could be your wedding present, since I didn’t have time to get you one before. It all happened so quickly...”

 

* * *

 

_Kagura looked at her grim reflection in the mirror and let out a long sigh. Today was not going to be a day she would easily forget. Even when she had washed the trauma down with a hard drink (of milk), she knew she would still taste it. The vivid, inescapable memory wasn’t going to let her taste much of anything else anytime soon. Tomorrow she could eat rice or pork or rice and pork or two servings of rice and pork, but through it all she would only be chewing on… the empty cry of the abyss._

“What is happening? What is with this flashback?” Toshirou exclaimed.

_Swallowing roughly, Kagura knew she had to be strong for those who couldn’t be. She walked over to where Sadaharu lay, whimpering, on the floor near the entryway. She brushed her hands through his fur._

“ _It’s going to be okay,” she murmured, wrapping her arms as far around him as she could._

_Sadaharu howled, and Kagura knew, she fundamentally **knew** that it was a howl for… _

_Rice and Pork._

“This is just about you being hungry, isn’t it,” the Yorozuya accused. “Did you not find the stuff I left for you in the fridge?”

_Staggering toward the kitchen, Kagura once again opened the refrigerator to stare at the lonely packs of expired yogurt huddled inside. She wondered if her tears could make magic. She wondered if she cried over the packs of yogurt maybe her tear drops could make the yogurt edible again. Maybe her sadness could turn back time._

“Everyone knows you don’t pay attention to the expiration date,” the Yorozuya said, not even pretending to pay attention to his upside down Jump anymore. “It’s just a ploy to get you to buy more yogurt than you actually need by throwing away perfectly good yogurt!”

_Her sadness would have needed to turn back a whole lot of time, because the yogurts had expired five years ago._

“How did you even find five year old yogurt?” Toshirou asked.

“It was on sale,” the Yorozuya muttered defensively.

“Where? At a museum?”

_Finally, something happened to distract her from her own misery and despair: two old drunk guys stumbled into the kitchen. The fluffy one let go of the smoky one for long enough to pick her up and twirl her around in the air._

“ _Ka-gu-ra-chan!” Gin-chan shouted, his stinky beer breath hitting her like a punch to the face. “Guess who’s getting hitched!”_

“ _Catherine,” she said, taking a shot in the dark._

_Mami 4 snorted, while Gin-chan replied, “I guess that is more likely than the truth, which is me. Me and that guy!”_

_She looked back and forth between Gin-chan and the Mami 4 he was pointing at as a large wave of happiness washed over her. This meant there was going to be an open buffet!_

“ _This is great news!” Kagura exclaimed about the open buffet._

“That was your reason for being happy about it?” Toshirou asked.

“ _It is amazing news,” Gin-chan replied gleefully, also referencing the open buffet._

“You too!” Toshirou shouted.

“ _So when’s it gonna happen?” Kagura asked, already imagining all the pork and all the rice._

_Gin-chan and Mami 4 looked at each other, having one of those silent conversations they always had when they wanted to say something but they didn’t want Kagura knowing about it, where they did things like raise their eyebrows, flick their ears, and pucker their lips at random intervals._

“We don’t do that,” Toshirou and the Yorozuya said in complete unison.

_After about two minutes of this, Mami 4 finally ran his teeth over his lower lip and scrunched his nose once then twice. Gin-chan nodded and turned back to Kagura._

“ _Whenever,” he replied with a shrug._

“Two minutes just for that?” Toshirou exclaimed.

‘ _Whenever.’ That was no good. This whole getting hitched thing was looking more and more like one of those spontaneous decisions the both of them would make when drunk and then forget all about the next day, so they would never actually follow through on it. Like that time they had decided Kagura should get 100,000 yen a week, or that time they had decided that Kagura should be able to pick where they would go to eat whenever they had the money for it, or that time they had decided that Mami 4 should designate at least 20 hours a week for mami-daughter activities, or that time that they had decided that Gin-chan should stop wiping his boogers on Kagura’s closet door, or that time-_

“We get it! We get it, already! Just get on with it,” the Yorozuya snapped.

_If this was going to be like all those other times, they would forget all about this by morning, but Kagura couldn’t let that happen. This time had to be different. She had to do something, and she had to do it fast. She had to get them married **tonight**._

_She couldn’t let this chance at rice and pork slip away._

“’ _Whenever’ could mean ‘now’,” Kagura said._

“You pushed this to happen just for some food?” Toshirou asked dryly.

_At Kagura’s words, Mami 4 gave her one of those stupid superior looks he liked to wear when he thought he knew more than her about things, but actually didn’t, because he was being stupid._

“Oi,” Toshirou said.

“ _Paperwork for something like this takes time,” Mami 4 said, stupidly. “And it’s the middle of the night.”_

“ _Don’t worry,” Kagura responded, much less stupidly. “I know a girl.”_

 

* * *

 

Cherry-Boy Toshirou stood shoulder to shoulder with Cherry-Boy Gintoki, staring up and up… and up at the building China’s flashback indicated they had gone to last night.

“I don’t remember exactly how we tied those cherry stems together – which isn’t to say I’m regretting it or anything, because I’m not, but you… you don’t think she was being serious about where it happened, right?” Toshirou asked.

The Yorozuya, who had remained uncharacteristically silent and sweaty on their brisk sprint over, turned in Toshirou’s direction with a neutral look and said, “Why don’t we knock on the front door and find out?”

“Because you don’t just show up and demand entry to the shogun’s palace!”

“Look at it this way,” Gintoki returned, brows furrowed, contemplative. “I mean, if we knock on the door and get let in that could mean that Kagura might have been telling the truth, but if we knock on the door and get instantly beheaded for our impudence then we know she was definitely lying. This could be the way to understand what really happened.”

“One of those options means we won’t understand anything ever again!” Toshirou snapped.

“Good point,” the Yorozuya said, nodding, surprisingly, in agreement, “we would halve the risk if just one of us did that.”

Suddenly, Toshirou found himself being pushed roughly toward the large looming gates.

“Hey! Hey! Wait a second!”

“You’re sort of a cop, right? Tell them you want to talk about cop things or something,” the Yorozuya hissed in his ear, and Toshirou used his proximity to grab him by the kimono and thrust him forward.

“It would sound more organic coming from you, an ordinary citizen. Tell them you filled out a comment card on the state of the government and want to turn it in,” Toshirou said.

“Hey, there’s no way anyone would believe I was an ordinary citizen at this point,” Gintoki replied, matter-of-fact, lips suddenly thinned and twisted. “Even though I never intended to spread it around, more and more evidence has been piling up to the point where only the willingly ignorant in this town are still in the dark about it. However, try as they might, even they won’t be able to hide from the truth of what I am much longer. Soon I will have to face the consequences… when everyone will know that I’m…”

The Yorozuya trailed off, looking pained. Was he really about to say it right here in front of the palace?

“I’m pre-diabetic,” he admitted.

“That’s what you’re assuming people are suspicious about?” Toshirou snapped, feeling dizzy from the goddamn emotional whiplash.

“My doctor put my blood test results on the wall of his office to scare and inspire his other patients into healthier habits,” he muttered.

“Setting aside how blatantly illegal that is, those results should really be inspiring _you_ , you sugarholic.”

“Oh, you’re one to talk, my ridiculous chain-smoker.” The Yorozuya snorted and grabbed Toshirou’s cigarette out of his mouth right as he was in the middle of taking a puff.

Before Toshirou could snatch it back, the Yorozuya flung it aside with a casual flick of the wrist, which is when time, suddenly,

**s**

**l**

**o**

**w**

**e**

**d**

 

**d**

**o**

**w**

**n**

 

Both of them turned their heads in the direction of the cigarette as it arced through air, heading right in the direction of the gates to the palace, which had, just at that very same second, started to open with a loud, imposing boom. The opening was wide enough by the time the cigarette got there that it slipped right on through and landed on the person standing right on the other side of them.

As the gates opened ever wider, more and more of this person was revealed. Toshirou and Gintoki saw the pristine, royal haori, laid over the elegant shoulders of a man with the deep, discerning eyes of a true ruler. His chonmage glistened in the morning sunlight, hair drawn back tightly in a way that only drew more attention to the cigarette steaming a hole into the center of his forehead.

After another moment, the cigarette fell, drawing a trail of ashes down the center of the man’s face as it did so.

But this wasn’t just any man. This was one particular man. A man who, well...

Toshirou wondered if he would get the chance to say goodbye to Kondo before they executed him.

“Cherry-Boys.” The man who led the nation greeted them calmly despite the flaring red burn mark that had just made its home on his forehead. “Welcome back.”

 

…

 

[SHOGUN KA YO!!!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Llk_n5BXjAM)

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shitty coping mechanisms.

Sitting, waiting, stewing in the third most spacious room he had ever set foot in, Toshirou decided it was time to throw any and all expectations out the window. Not only had he become a Cherry-Boy overnight, he had also apparently become one in the most insane way imaginable – by involving the very shogunate itself at the behest of a hungry Cherry-Girl.

Before jumping to any more conclusions, he would figure out all the facts, and only then would he decide how hard he was going to punch the Yorozuya in the face. This was all his fault, after all. Who says yes to the sort of shitty proposal Toshirou had been spouting yesterday? Only an idiot, that’s who.

An idiot who wouldn’t stop calling Toshirou’s bluffs, and kept charging forward into this mockery of a relationship that never should have existed in the first place. He was starting to question whether there was anything out there that would make the Yorozuya stop and quit this, which didn’t make any sense. What kind of person would keep on playing what they thought was an incredibly drawn out game of gay chicken for weeks.. months... seemingly _forever,_ when a single moment of honesty could easily end it all? Was being a thorny in Toshirou’s side really that important?

His eyes naturally followed his train of thought to glance over at Gintoki just as those lackluster red eyes were moving to look at him. Alone together in this room, waiting for the consequences that their actions the previous night followed by a poorly thrown cigarette in the morning would bring, Toshirou felt there were a million and a half things he should – no, he _needed_ to shout into existence, but right when he drummed up the conviction to try, the Yorozuya cleared his throat and spoke first.

“Hey,” he ventured carefully, sounding like a man at long last giving voice to something he had given a great deal of thought, “how many bathrooms do you think there are in here?”

“Who the hell cares!”

Okay, this one was on Toshirou. It was his own damn fault for assuming the Yorozuya had some legitimate, complex thought processes going on inside that fluff ball he insisted on calling a head. That was Toshirou’s mistake. He would admit to it.

“It could be one of two kinds of numbers, I’m thinking,” Gintoki barreled on intently, utterly ignoring the acidic stare Toshirou was sending his way. “Either it’s a really high number, which is the obvious guess, or it could be really low, like two.”

“There’s no way there would just be two bathrooms in a place this big. Are you an idiot?”

The Yorozuya sighed and looked down his nose at Toshirou, like he was trying his best to convey the obvious to someone terribly stupid.

“Sometimes it not about the quantity, it’s about the _quality_. The upper class have standards, as hard as that might be for a country bumpkin samurai like you to understand,” he asserted from up on his high horse.

“I don’t want to hear that from a dirt poor, layabout samurai like you! Stop putting on airs. It’s pissing me off.”

“Look at it this way,” the Yorozuya insisted. “The Shogun has his own Special Shogun Bedroom right? He has his own Special Shogun Pajamas he uses to sleep in his own Special Shogun Bed. When he wakes up, he has his own Special Shogun Table where he eats his own Special Shogun Wheaties. When he finishes his own Special Shogun Breakfast, he has his own Special Shogun Kite to fly on Special Shogun Windy days. He also has his own Special Shogun Butterfly Net he takes to run through his own Special Shogun Field of Flowers to catch some Special Shogun Butterflies-”

“Oi, what do you think the Shogun’s everyday routine is like? Why is he catching butterflies?”

“What I’m saying is, why would his toilet be any different? Why wouldn’t he have his one, singular Special Shogun Toilet?”

Unfortunately, the Yorozuya’s line of logic was starting to strangely make sense.

“I’m betting you that whenever the Shogun needs to do his own Special Shogun Business, he has his own Special Shogun Place to do it,” the Yorozuya declared.

“Fine,” Toshirou muttered. “Even if that were true, there would have to be more bathrooms for all the rest of everyone.”

“Which is where that second bathroom comes in,” the Yorozuya said confidently. “That’s where everyone else does their ones and twos.”

“Why would there only be one bathroom for all the rest of the palace? There’s too many people. The line would always be all the way out to Kabukicho. Nothing would ever get done!”

“It wouldn’t be a single toilet, obviously. It would be a long line of them. Ten, twenty, _thirty_ toilets all in a row.”

“There would never be such a disgusting public toilet situation here,” Toshirou exclaimed.

“So what, then?” the Yorozuya challenged. “You think there would be private toilets? Do you also think that the palace guards get to wear the same armor as the Shogun?”

“Of course not,” Toshirou said quickly. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Well, why would any of them be able to shit in the same situation as the Shogun?”

“I –”

“If everyone else got to have a private toilet, they would be putting themselves on the Shogun’s level in his own home. Is there no greater disrespect? To honor their leader, it is their _duty_ to shit and piss in a public stall situation. Anything else would be –”

“Treasonous,” Toshirou finished, comprehension dawning.

“Right? I bet I’m right,” the Yorozuya said, wrapping an arm around Toshirou’s shoulders, grinning victoriously. “Aren’t you curious?”

Actually, yes. Yes, he was. Toshirou was now _deathly_ curious. Not that he would ever admit it. No, not when Gintoki was looking at him with that knowing smirk, like he could already tell this question was going to keep him up at night. Like he knew Toshirou was going to go back to the barracks and ask Kondo about this at his first opportunity, because his commander was the most likely person in his immediate social circle to have dropped a deuce in the palace.

“I hope I am not interrupting.”

Speaking of deuces in the palace, the Mimawarigumi’s head, Sasaki Isaburo, made an appearance in the doorway.

The Yorozuya lazily waved him in.

“I must say, I am somewhat surprised to see you both again so soon,” Sasaki said, sitting down across from them.

Considering a Mimawarigumi officer had been the one to hand deliver Toshirou’s new ID earlier that morning, there had not been even the slightest possibility that the lead asshole had kept his nose out of all this. Dammit.

“I had planned to have the rest of your paperwork delivered to your respective residences,” Sasaki continued, “but it will save me the time to hand it all to you directly.”

Pulling out two thick stacks of paper, he passed one to Toshirou and the other to the Yorozuya.

“Here are both of your copies. Everything was completed by me personally, and, as such, you can expect it to carry an elite status: wholly error-free, entirely binding, and fully official. No other couple in modern history has received such a fast track to every and all certifications required for their marriage, but, due to orders on high, the impossible was made possible. Felicitations on your most celebrated union.”

Flipping through the documents, seeing all the right signatures and all the right stamps in all the right places, Toshirou now had terribly thorough confirmation that he was undeniably, indisputably a Cherry-Boy. He was married to a man who mainly used any and all of what intellect he had to analyze the toilet situation of his country’s leader.

Well, at least no one was bringing up that cigarette thing.

“So,” the Yorozuya ventured, knuckle deep in one nostril, “is it really 100% legit? I’m only asking because I don’t want anyone to be able to question how truly and amazingly married we are, and for no other reason. Just how airtight is this?”

“To the level of being truly asphyxiating,” Sasaki answered without hesitation. “And only made stronger by your impassioned prenuptial agreement.”

Huh? While wasted off their asses, the two of them had still found the time and urge to write up a prenup last night? Toshirou flipped through his paperwork, looking for the document that could possibly, miraculously make this situation even worse than it already was, but, strangely, he came up empty.

“I don’t have a copy here,” he said.

Was it too much to ask for that this bland-faced excuse for human sandpaper sitting in front of him had been mistaken and was actually talking about some other prenup for some other Shogun-sanctioned speed-wedding he had done the paperwork for over the last few hours?

“As agreed, I did not transcribe the conversation, and have left it in video form,” Sasaki said, tapping away at his phone. “Here you are.”

Feeling his own phone buzz, Toshirou grabbed it with no small sense of terror and looked at the media message he just received. It was titled: **Cherry-Boy Wedding: Prenuptial Video Agreement (lol (^_−)☆)**

“You are welcome to review the footage to confirm everything is there, or you can take my elite excellence at its word when I say every single syllable each of you uttered was included,” Sasaki said in monotone, but Toshirou could just tell that every shitty pore on that asshole’s body was radiating poorly contained amusement.

“Stop glaring at your weird cop rival and start the video already,” the Yorozuya ordered imperiously, leaning over his shoulder. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”

“Alright, alright,” Toshirou huffed, steadied himself, and pressed play.

_There they were, Video Toshirou and Video Gintoki, pink-cheeked, straight-backed, and dressed to match in the formal wear of Shinto grooms, squashed together against the backdrop of a gleaming, golden wall that could not have reasonably existed anywhere outside of the Shogun’s palace. Video Toshirou had his hands on the Video Yorozuya’s haori, trying to adjust it properly onto his shoulders as the Video Yorozuya slapped his hands away._

“ _It’s fine. Leave it,” the Video Yorozuya slurred._

“ _You can’t treat these clothes with the same carelessness you do to your own. Show some respect,” Video Toshirou snapped in reply, refusing to be swayed from his task._

“ _Hey, I respect these clothes,” the Video Yorozuya claimed then grinned, swayed in, and said in lower voice that was still easily picked up by the camera, “I respect your clothes too.”_

_Video Toshirou stared for a moment before continuing his efforts to smooth out a wrinkle there and readjust a cord here. Suddenly, with two hands, he grabbed the material and yanked the Video Yorozuya even closer, their noses knocking together._

“ _If this is your definition of respect, I think you need to relearn the concept,” he drawled._

_The Video Yorozuya mirrored his grab, their mouths now a hairsbreadth apart, and said, “If you want respect, Gin-san can give you some. As long as you ask very very nicely.”  
_

“ _Who’s going to ask you for anything?”_

“ _Once this ceremony is over, I’ll –”_

Toshirou slammed the pause button on pure, self-preservational reflex. He heard some mild choking coming from behind him.

“Are you two alright?” Sasaki asked, knowing full damn well what they were currently looking at.

Resisting the urge to tell him, in no uncertain terms, to fuck the hell off, Toshirou said, “We’re fine,” at the same time the Yorozuya said, “Foot cramp,” and shook one of his legs rapidly in the air.

Sasaki calmly absorbed the scene.

“If you would prefer to skip the flirting and groping, and head straight to the legal logistical part of this video contract, move forward by about ten minutes,” he suggested.

THERE WAS TEN MINUTES OF THIS!

“Why did nobody stop us?” Toshirou asked desperately.

“If I am to be frank,” Sasaki began then paused, taking off his monocle and wiping it thoroughly with a kerchief before saying, “because it was hilarious.”

Wasn’t there any way Toshirou could kill this guy and get away with it? Wasn’t the annual purge coming up or something?

Resisting his homicidal urges the best he could, he roughly forwarded the video to the ten minute mark and resumed play.

_Despite Video Toshirou’s initial efforts, both of their clothes now looked irredeemably a mess. Wrinkles and tears were everywhere, while Video Gintoki was missing both shoes and Video Toshirou’s haori was somehow on backward. Neither seemed to care, as they looked at the camera seriously – out of breath, but seriously._

“ _So we both have to say it?” Video Toshirou hiccuped, his hair on one side sticking up at all angles. “Can’t I just say it for the both of us? I’m better at this stuff.”_

“ _You both have to state your identities and purpose. You are forming a verbal, recorded contract, after all,” Video Sasaki’s voice said entirely too cheerfully from behind the camera._

“ _Okay, well, cherry boys first then,” the Video Yorozuya offered, snickering with a mouth that was much redder and more swollen than it had been earlier in the video._

“ _We’ll **both** be Cherry-Boys soon,” Video Toshirou asserted, grinning and catching the laughter._

“ _That’s right,” the Video Yorozuya said, awed, as he suddenly seemed to be reminded of why they were both there in the first place. “We should say it together then.”_

“ _On three,” Video Toshirou agreed._

“ _One.”_

“ _Two.”_

“ _Three.”_

“ _My name is Sakata Gintoki.”  
_ “ _My name is Hijikata Toshirou.”_

“ _Soon I will be Cherry-Boy Gintoki.”  
_ “ _Tonight I become Cherry-Boy Toshirou.”_

“ _This is my prenup… blah blah blah, same as what the other guy is saying.”  
_ “ _This video serves as my prenuptial agreement with Sakata Gintoki, soon to be Cherry-Boy Gintoki.”_

“ _If our marriage ever ends, I swear to follow the terms of this prenuptial agreement in both letter and spirit,” said Video Toshirou, as the only one still speaking._

_The Video Yorozuya, on the other hand, was looking at Video Toshirou with pure, dry irritation._

“ _Wow,” he said, sneering, “it really sucks to be the person getting hitched to your wagon. You won’t even wait until the ‘I do’ before planning the ‘I don’t want to anymore’. You’re just like those assholes who want to see the gift receipt before even opening their present.”_

“ _This is what a prenup is, dumbass,” Video Toshirou said, looking annoyed to be interrupted. “It talks about who gets what if someone wants a split. You were the one who wanted the prenup in the first place and you didn’t even know what it was?”_

_Freezing for a moment, Video Gintoki then bit the inside of his cheek, looking the other way._

“ _I knew what it was, obviously. I wrote the definition of the word when it was first being put into the dictionary,” he muttered, sullen, to the floor. “That was one of my toughest jobs, and it didn’t pay nearly enough.”_

_Video Toshirou stared openly at the Video Yorozuya before clearing his throat and saying, “Hey.”_

_There was silence. No one moved._

“ _Yorozuya. Look at me.”_

_Slowly, the Video Yorozuya’s eyes came to meet Video Toshirou’s. He let out a breath that only seemed to leave him more tightly coiled than before, fists clenched at his sides._

“ _Maybe I didn’t know much more about it than that it was a thing people did before they got hitched,” he said. “So what? We’re getting this all taken care of at light speed and that means we’re skipping a lot of steps. I’m trying to pick up all the marriage things I can along the way, so when you look back at this in one month, ten years, whatever, you won’t be thinking about what you missed or never got to do. You’ll just be thinking of all the things you did do. With me. You have a fucking problem with that, my idiot fiancé?”_

_The Video Yorozuya crossed his arms aggressively, stance wide and nostrils flaring, as if daring someone to comment._

Toshirou couldn’t help but glance over at the present day Yorozuya, who was staring intently at the wall on the other side of the room as if it was the most fascinating thing in the world, refusing to acknowledge Toshirou’s gaze. It was hard not to laugh. This was all the Yorozuya’s own damn fault for getting trashed enough to blab about pointless things like that, and being extra careless enough to get it all caught on video, no less.

You could never take a drunk at his word, just like you could never trust your own drunken words not to be taken from you.

Now Sasaki or whoever else got a hold of this video file could easily show it to anyone they’d like and fool them into the thinking the Yorozuya was something he wasn’t. Something that… Toshirou had no urge to dwell on, because it was just drunken babble. Babble he was better than. You wouldn’t find Toshirou spewing nonsense like that on camera. He could hold himself together even with more than a few drinks in his belly.

“ _You don’t get it. This is **our** prenup. We can make it whatever we want it to be,” Video Toshirou was declaring. “We can even make it something we know we will never use.”_

_Video Toshirou turned to stare directly at the camera._

“ _If I ever ask for a divorce, I will quit the Shinsengumi.”_

Toshirou broke his phone in half.

“Oops,” he said, feeling like he was speaking the word at a large distance from his own body – like his spirit was floating somewhere on the other side of town, while his physical jaw, here in the Shogun’s palace, moved woodenly up and down.

“Not a problem,” Sasaki said, pulling out a large sack filled with phones of all shapes and sizes. “I have spares just for this sort of occasion. Pick whichever one you would like. They all have this video downloaded and ready to view.”

Out of his periphery, Toshirou vaguely noted that Gintoki was rummaging hastily through the bag, but he was too busy mentally replaying the words Video Toshirou had just said to really care.

_I will quit the Shinsengumi._

_I will quit the Shinsengumi._

_I will quit the Shinsengumi._

_I will quit the Shinsengumi._

_I will quit the Shin–_

_How could you say that, Video Toshirou! How could you do that? How could you be so drunk and stupid? Is that it? Are you an idiot? Are you a super idiot? How could you screw us over like that, Video Toshirou!!_

Cherry-Boy Toshirou felt the inevitability of his Cherry-Boy fate slam down around him. There was no escape. He could never get out of this, because it would mean betraying his very purpose in life. He either remained Cherry-Boy Vice-Commander, or he escaped as Hijikata Nobody, and all because stupid Video Toshirou felt the stupid need to comfort a stupid Video Yorozuya!

Unless… there might still be a way.

If Toshirou ended things, he had to leave the Shinsengumi, but if the _Yorozuya_ ended things, there wasn’t the same limitation. Toshirou just had to do what he had always been trying to do: get the Yorozuya to admit he didn’t want any of this.

Next to him, that very Yorozuya was clumsily fiddling with buttons on a new phone, eyes shadowed and lips grim.

What was his problem? Shouldn’t he have been cackling with glee over the fool Video Toshirou had just made of himself?

“I… I, well,” the Yorozuya said, sounding… strange. “I think I remember what I said next. I thought it was a dream, but I also thought what you said about the Shinsengumi was a dream until I saw it on video just now.”

Toshirou felt a cold sweat gather on the back of his neck.

“What did you say?”

Instead of replying, the Yorozuya held the phone out between them and pressed play.

“ _If I ever ask for a divorce, I will quit the Shinsengumi,” Video Toshirou was saying with emphasis._

_The Video Yorozuya gazed at Video Toshirou, and while his mouth was a straight, neutral line, his eyes were warm and bright._

“ _I see,” he said simply. “That’s good.”_

_He nodded to himself, seeming to finally fully approve of the whole state of affairs._

“ _You have no intention of going back on your word,” the Video Yorozuya said, “and neither do I. If I leave you before my death, I will never eat sugar again.”_

The Yorozuya’s hand crushed the phone into a ball of sparking trash.

“Oops,” he said, stilted. “Hand cramp.”

With shaking, trembling fingers, the Yorozuya grabbed another phone out of the bag. He stared at it for a moment before slamming it into the floor, shattering it to pieces.

“Oops,” he said again. “Another hand cramp.”

“Here,” Toshirou attempted through his terrible case of dry mouth, “let me do it.”

He took another phone out of the bag. He stared at it for a moment before bringing it up to his face and biting it in half.

“Oops,” Toshirou said, spitting out a mouthful of electronics. “My hand slipped.”

Sighing delicately, Sasaki asked, “Would you two stop breaking my phones? While it may seem so, I do not have a literally _infinite_ supply.”

“How many do you have?” Gintoki asked intently. “We will stop breaking them at one less than that number.”

“So you admit you are breaking them on purpose now,” Sasaki accused.

It was making Toshirou feel marginally better to destroy this asshole’s phone collection, yes. The Video Yorozuya had somehow managed to make a promise that rivaled Video Toshirou’s own in its devastating stupidity. That idiot wouldn’t be able to survive a week without his disgustingly sweet ingredient of choice.

Carefully, cautiously, Toshirou ventured to imagine what the world might be like without mayonnaise and nearly blacked out from the pure, emotional agony.

“While the potential penalties you made for yourselves are what one might consider to be extreme,” Sasaki continued mildly, “neither of you need concern yourselves with them as long as you are as serious about your lifelong commitment to each other. Given the rare, direct blessing of the Shogun, you would not have gone through with your marriage if you had not been, of course. Only a pair of completely incompetent and most certainly inebriated imbeciles would even dream of doing something so mindbogglingly stupid and shortsighted.”

“Well, fortunately for the country, we Cherry-Boys aren’t any of those things, Sasaki-dono,” Toshirou replied, gravel rough.

He was the only one who got to say that any of this was stupid.

“Fortunately indeed,” Sasaki said with a small, loaded smile. “And now is the moment to let the country know that truth. As this is the first time the current Shogun has personally presided over a marriage, the public is excited to hear the details. His choice in many ways uniquely represents the kind of future and progress he envisions for his people. The Shogun will speak on the subject in...” He trailed off and looked at his pocket watch. “Thirty minutes. Since you returned to the palace in time for his pronouncement, the Dai Shogun Shige Shige would like the pair of you by his side as he speaks to the world about your nuptials.”

Any blood remaining in Toshirou’s face swiftly left the vicinity. He was still personally struggling to adjust to his new Cherry-Boy reality and now the whole of humanity had to be let in on it? Immediately? Right this second? Couldn’t he have a little more time to figure out how he could make this all go away first?

“Nah,” the Yorozuya said bluntly, looking like it was as easy for him to refuse this as it would be for him to turn down the offer of a shady newspaper subscription from a door-to-door salesman.

Internally, Toshirou envied his bravado. Externally, he grabbed the Yorozuya by the shirt collar and roughly tugged on it so that his ear close enough to hiss into. “This is a request from the Shogun. We don’t get to say no.”

“Your heard the guy,” the Yorozuya said in response, vaguely gesturing in Sasaki’s direction. “This is the first time our Sho-chan has put his personal stamp of approval on a wedding. What would it look like to his adoring public if he suddenly took it all back or punished us for not acting the way he wanted us to? It wouldn’t be a good look, that’s all I’m saying.”

“It doesn’t matter what he can or can’t do,” Toshirou argued. “With the uniform I wear, pissing off the Shogun isn’t an option.”

“Nobody’s trying to piss off the Shogun, piss on the Shogun, whatever,” the Yorozuya proclaimed dismissively, standing up and shuffling toward the hallway. “All I’m trying to do is figure out where I need to go to take a piss in a toilet.”

 

* * *

 

When Toshirou caught up with the idiot, the Yorozuya was standing, back to him, at a crossroads. The hallway continued forward, with two other paths branching to the right and to the left, and the Yorozuya smack dab in the middle of it all.

In place of a greeting or even turning to face him, the Yorozuya simply asked, “If you were a toilet, which way would you be?”

Toshirou wished he knew, so he could dunk the Yorozuya’s head in the nearest one. That was where you were supposed to put pieces of shit, after all.

“What, too prideful to ask for directions?” he challenged.

“I just asked you.”

“I don’t count,” Toshirou said. “You already knew I didn’t know where the hell it was.”

“No, I didn’t,” the Yorozuya replied, still only giving Toshirou the back of his head from which to gather context clues. “Before you got here, you could have been asking five, ten, twenty people for directions. You could have asked a person to hand carve a map into a stone tablet in the time it took you to arrive.”

“You saying I’m late?”

What right did the Yorozuya have to expect Toshirou to just follow along? What goddamn right did he have to think Toshirou would just unquestioningly join him on this pointless quest for a crapper when the Shogun was waiting? What kind of fucked up priorities did he think the Vice Commander of the Shinsengumi had?

Then the Yorozuya turned.

The left sleeve of his Saturday yukata flapped loosely with the motion, lacking the structure and solidity of his arm, which was nestled completely inside the garment, casually, but protectively, draped across his stomach as if covering a wound no one else could see. His eyelids were at their standard half mast, but the eyes within lacked their usual dull glaze, which had instead been replaced with a strange attentiveness. His lips were curled upward into something that could barely be called a smile. It was a gentle thing, entirely lacking in joy. It was too mature, too real for someone like him. How could he look so...

“I’m saying you count,” Gintoki uttered, resigned.

Taking in this sight of the man, Toshirou tensed, a quick, hot anger flaring up at something he couldn’t quite name or define in the moment. He didn’t want him looking like that. He didn’t want that face to ever have cause to warp in such a way.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he ventured, on edge.

Maybe the Yorozuya wasn’t taking this whole Cherry-Boy thing as much in stride as Toshirou had previously thought. Maybe this whole toilet side mission hadn’t been so much about the toilets as it had been about… well, not being about other things.

“It means,” the Yorozuya said, entirely back to his dead-eyed, unassuming, lazy demeanor before Toshirou could finish half a blink, “I’m asking you to put us on the right path for the bathroom.” He held out his arms in the mockery of a pleading gesture, continuing in monotone, “Help me, Toilet-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

Or maybe this was all just about the toilets. God fucking dammit.

“Who are you calling Toilet-Wan Kenobi?” he exclaimed, finding a concrete target for his anger. “For the last time, I have no idea where the bathroom is!”

Foolishly walking within reach of Toshirou’s fist, the Yorozuya drawled, “Toilets aren’t something you can know about logically. You can’t just locate them with your mind. Finding them takes a little something else.”

“That’s not quite right. You probably just need a few things knocked into place,” Toshirou replied easily, throwing a punch right at the center of his stupid face.

The Yorozuya caught his fist, closing a hand over it and holding it there, suspended, humiliatingly, in air. Damn the strength of this fucker.

Slowly, despite all the resistance he could muster, the Yorozuya forcibly lowered his fist, and pushed it firmly against Toshirou’s own lower abdomen.

“With toilets,” Gintoki spoke with emphasis, “it all comes from your guts.”

ALL THAT FOR A PUN?

“Which way is your gut telling you to go?” he continued.

After a moment of silence, Toshirou kicked the Yorozuya roughly in the shin.

Stumbling back with a hop and a dark look, the Yorozuya snapped, “Don’t blame me if it’s all backed up in there. They have medication for that.”

With a little distance now put between himself and the root of all his problems, Toshirou took a steadying breath. All that mattered was getting the Yorozuya to stand beside the Shogun in twenty minutes. Everything else could come later.

“If I get it right, if I figure out where they are, afterward you’re coming with me to support the Shogun,” Toshirou said, holding out his hand with an open palm this time.

Without hesitation or fanfare, the Yorozuya shook it.

“Fine. Deal,” he said, “but no asking anyone else for directions. This is all on you.”

“Deal,” Toshirou repeated, took back his hand, and, ignoring the paths to the left and to the right, walked forward.

 

* * *

 

The first convenient part of being a Shogun-sanctioned Cherry-Boy that Toshirou had thus far discovered was his general ability to be anywhere inside the Shogun’s palace without question or suspicion. As he and the Yorozuya wandered the halls, any guards passing by only lowered their heads deferentially in acknowledgment.

While he had taken a number of ego-blows downward as he cherried, this same cherry-fication had also apparently taken him a few steps up Edo’s food chain. Perhaps that could be of some use to Kondo someday. If so, this whole thing wasn’t all completely terrible.

But a lot of it was.

With the Yorozuya shuffling along right beside him, it was getting harder and harder to ignore Sasaki’s parting words.

After Gintoki had strode out of the room on his stupid toilet mission, Toshirou had stayed behind with Sasaki to gather the paperwork and grab himself one final new phone. As he did so, in the back of his mind, he had held onto the faint hope that the Yorozuya would stumble back into the room within a minute or two, after having either successfully found his target and returned, or after having felt like his stupid joke had played on for long enough. There was a part of him that had assumed the Yorozuya would have enough common sense to listen to the words of the Shogun.

As it turned out, that part of him had been wrong.

“I’ll bring him back,” Toshirou had said finally.

He had almost left the room before Sasaki had replied:

“ _You have been presented with a good opportunity. Here you will see, from the very start, if you can manage to appropriately collar and tame the wild beast you have decided to let into your home.”_

Toshirou had not responded to those words then, but they still echoed in his head now. Is this what his life was going to be like from now on – just a whirlwind of attempts to snatch the Yorozuya back from whatever stupid, thoughtless ledge he had made the split second decision to jump off of?

“Hey, Yorozuya, stop picking your nose at this cocktail party that you were required to come to as my partner cherry, because you are really ruining my chances of getting that government bigwig to your right to fund a personnel increase for the Shinsengumi.”

“Hey, Yorozuya, when you next see the Amanto diplomat that was bankrupting innocent families by giving them loans with hidden, monstrous interest rates, could you maybe not punch him in the face so hard that he tries to convince his home planet to put Earth under a trade embargo?”

“Hey, Yorozuya, I know you saw that little girl crying in a corner, but did you really have to go and release her mother and father from the underground slave trade run by the people who control the finances of the police commissioner?”

“Hey, Yorozuya, could you stop confronting situations so tightly wrapped within complex political machinations, blood money, and government sanctioned criminality head-on? Could you stop fighting for those you consider worth protecting without considering the consequences?”

“Hey, Gintoki, could you stop being a good, honorable man?”

Over his years as Vice-Commander, Toshirou had done a number of things that he would have preferred no one to have done, but even with his mile long, blood-and-viscera-stained rap sheet to hold out as a comparison, the thought of reining in, of collaring that side of the Yorozuya felt unbearable.

Here, finally, Toshirou was able to put words to the anger he had felt, boiling, festering, ever since he had encountered the Yorozuya in the middle of the hall.

He was angry at himself.

How dare he put himself in this position where inevitably he would have to make choices between betraying his uniform and his commander or betraying this person he was stupidly, carelessly in love with. How dare he let it get to this point!

From the start of it all, from the moment he had confessed his feelings in that bar half a year ago, this was what he had been trying to avoid. He had done his best to minimize the Yorozuya’s presence in his life and his thoughts, and, in doing so, had caused the opposite. Now here the asshole was, larger than life, one Cherry-Boy of a knotted set of two, putting Toshirou in a place that no matter where he looked, he would have to look away from something else.

“So, did you remember?” that very Yorozuya asked, nudging his shoulder.

“Remember what?” Toshirou spit out.

“From the look on your face, it seemed like you might have remembered more about...” The Yorozuya flapped a hand in a vague gesture. “You know, last night.”

As a mental exercise, Toshirou poked and prodded the fog that was his memory of the previous evening, but did not come up with anything new.

“Nothing past what was probably the last bar we went to,” he admitted.

The Yorozuya hummed his acknowledgment, saying nothing more, but Toshirou wasn’t going to let him sweep things under the rug that easily. Ever since they had made their toilet bet, the Yorozuya had been strangely silent and subdued. It made him wonder.

“You saying _you_ remember?” he prompted.

“Mm, the video jogged my memory a bit,” the Yorozuya replied vaguely, glancing away. “It was enough to remind me that Shinpachi brought enough Tupperware containers to store a good amount of leftovers. That was a big weight off my mind.”

Still everything goes back to the buffet!

“Congratulations,” Toshirou said, sour, before demanding, “What else?”

The Yorozuya paused for long enough before speaking that instead of answering, he asked, “Another crossroads. Right or left?”

Toshirou had a feeling – he would never admit to it, but he had a _gut feeling_ – that this was his final choice. One way would ultimately lead to those toilets and the other… wouldn’t.

So which way? How could he tell?

Suddenly, a low grumble came from low down inside him. From his gut, in particular. The grumble soon morphed into a voice that sounded a whole lot like Kondo as it said, _Use the force, Toshi._

Was it… Could it possibly be…? _Toilet-Wan Kondobi!_

_Yes, Toshi, it’s me,_ Toilet-Wan gurgled. _I am here to guide you on the right path._

_How?_ Toshirou thought to himself. _How could I possibly know which way to go?_

_You feel it! You sense it! If you were to see me, Kondobi, standing before you right now doing the little I-need-to-shit-in-five-seconds-or-I’m-going-to-be-soiling-myself dance, which direction would you tell me to run?_

_I don’t know._

_Your guidance is all that lies between me and a gruesome brown stain all over the back of my pants. Tell me where to go._

_I don’t know. I don’t –_

_WHICH DIRECTION, TOSHI?_

“Right,” Toshirou exclaimed his epiphany aloud. “It’s to the right!”

“Okay, calm down,” the Yorozuya said, looking at him strangely.

As the Yorozuya moved to take a step down the hallway, Toshirou’s hand shot out on instinct, grabbing him by the shoulder and yanking him back.

“Wait,” he said suddenly.

“Hey, don’t be so rough,” the Yorozuya grumbled, shaking off his arm. “I’m not another one of your terrorist bimbos you can just throw around a jail cell all night long.”

“What the hell’s a terrorist bimbo?” Toshirou retorted reflexively, before course correcting with a quick, “Actually, never mind. Don’t ever tell me that.”

Toshirou wouldn’t allow himself to get sidetracked – not right now. Before they went down the final hallway that, if Kondobi had indeed guided him well and true, would take them where they were looking to go, there was something he needed to know. There was a truth he needed to uncover, and he would dig it straight out of the Yorozuya’s larynx if he had to.

“Instead,” he said, “tell me why you’re so reluctant to listen to the Shogun’s request.”

“What does it matter? It just seemed troublesome,” the Yorozuya snorted, idly looking down the right hallway as he spoke. “Don’t worry, I’ll still honor my side of the bargain if you accomplish yours.”

Undaunted by the non-answer, Toshirou pursued, “You know it’s too late to stop people from finding out you’re a Cherry-Boy, right?”

“Why would I have a problem with anyone knowing that? That would mean I had a problem with our name, which I don’t,” the Yorozuya insisted. “On the contrary, I think we should get matching t-shirts that say ‘I’m With My Cherry-Boy’ with an arrow pointed to the side that we always wear when we go out together.”

Toshirou fiercely ignored that gruesome image of his possible future.

“So what is it then? Stage fright?”

“How dare you say such words to a Main Character!”

“You having a bad hair day or something?”

“My hair’s fine, asshole,” the Yorozuya snapped. “Just let it go.”

“No,” Toshirou said, as serious as he had ever been. “I need to know.”

Finally looking his way, the Yorozuya seemed to take in his expression, picking it apart before heaving in a large, obnoxious breath through his nose, lips thinning.

“Fine,” he said. “It’s because this – whatever it is – isn’t about the shogunate. It isn’t about the direction of the country; it’s about us.”

It was a simple explanation with a rather complex undercurrent – one that Toshirou felt he might have the tools to understand... somewhat.

When he had first discovered who exactly Gintoki was, or, more accurately, who he _had_ been, Toshirou had thought the guy’s utter lack of notable ambition or political will at the time could have been his strategy for avoiding the ire of the Shinsengumi and the rest of the government. He had wondered, for a half a moment, if the casual, Odd Jobs way of life had been a clever facade.

He had recalled whispered conversations he would sometimes overhear throughout town about the Kansei Purge, with lowered, but enthusiastic voices discussing the adventures of The Rampaging Noble, The Dragon of Katsurahama, and, in particular, The White Demon. Could the root of that immense legend really just be this guy who would lazily dig about in his ear as he waited to spend his meager pachinko winnings on a bar of ice cream and that week’s Jump at the local convenience store?

In the end, he had realized that yes, it absolutely, idiotically could.

For someone who had become such a large symbol of the rebellion, the Yorozuya led such a plain, down-to-earth life to the extent that it almost appeared to be overcompensation.

At the very least, Toshirou understood that this guy knew better than most the consequences that came from being mythologized – of what it felt like to have apocryphal tales floating around about you much taller than those your close friends and enemies would tell. In response, it seemed as though there were certain parts of himself that Gintoki stubbornly guarded from the larger limelight, and Toshirou wondered what it meant that this thing they shared seemed to be a part of that.

“Unless... that was actually your plan all along – making you and me into a propaganda story for the government,” the Yorozuya continued with a crude sneer. “If that’s the case, I still might go along with your shitty plan if you ask me nicely. And by asking nicely I mean groveling on the floor as you sob and beg for my assistance, while licking my boots.”

Toshirou scoffed and began striding down the hallway.

“If I wanted a propaganda story, you’d be the last person I’d ask. Even the members of my bowling team are better suited to that sort of PR,” he said wryly.

“Don’t tell that to Kagura, or it’ll go to her head. If she starts setting up autograph sessions in the park again, I’m blaming you,” the Yorozuya warned, keeping pace beside him. “And not that I care or anything, but didn’t you say the toilets were to the right? Why are we going left?”

“I changed my mind,” Toshirou said simply. “This is the way to go.”

As soon as he said this, a man dressed in the uniform of a palace guard came running past them at full speed toward the hallway that had been to their right, hollering, “GODDAMN TOUGO ALWAYS PUTTING LAXATIVES IN MY TEA. I AM WHOOPING HIS ASS TO MARS AS SOON AS I GET OFF THE TOILET, WHICH I AM CURRENTLY RUNNING TOWARD, IT BEING TO THE RIGHT, **NOT** TO THE LEFT.”

The footsteps quickly faded and, after a heavy pause, Toshirou cleared his throat and muttered, “Well, that could have been about anything. Let’s keep going.”

“If you say so,” the Yorozuya replied, suddenly appearing to be in fine humor.

They continued walking down the hall, and, between the two of them, soon picked up a steady, natural rhythm. It was almost a little too easy to fall into step and into sync. 

 

* * *

 

A long way up and across the palace, Sasaki Isaburo’s phone beeped to notify him of an incoming text. It read:

_Please pass along our deepest regrets to the Shogun. We will not be able to attend.  
-C.T._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At long last, all the pieces have been placed on the board. With the next chapter, we enter endgame. Buckle up. It’s gonna be a bumpy train ride.
> 
> If I had to describe the final 2-3 chapters in one word, what would it be?  
> Of course, **ax**.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S08bs1gfDpw


End file.
